Development of a Coherent Doppler Lidar for Precision Maneuvering and Landing of Space Vehicles

A coherent Doppler lidar has been developed to address NASAs need for a high-performance, compact, and cost-effective velocity and altitude sensor onboard its landing vehicles. Future robotic and manned missions to planetary bodies require precise ground-relative velocity vector and altitude data to execute complex descent maneuvers and safe, soft landing at a pre-designated site. This lidar sensor, referred to as a Navigation Doppler Lidar, meets the required performance of landing missions while complying with vehicle size, mass, and power constraints. Operating from over five kilometers altitude, the lidar obtains velocity and range precision measurements with 2 cm/sec and 2 meters, respectively, dominated by the vehicle motion. After a series of flight tests onboard helicopters and rocket-powered free-flyer vehicles, the Navigation Doppler Lidar is now being ruggedized for future missions to various destinations in the solar system

Classical trajectories in polar-asymmetric laser fields : Synchronous THz and XUV emission

The interaction of intense near- and mid-infrared laser pulses with rare gases has produced bursts of radiation with spectral content extending into the extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray region of electromagnetic spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, laser-driven gas plasmas has been shown to produce coherent sub-harmonic optical waveforms, covering from terahertz (THz) to mid- and near-infrared frequency spectral band. Both processes can be enhanced via a combination of a driving field and its second harmonic. Despite this striking similarity, only limited experimental and theoretical attempts have been made to address these two regimes simultaneously. Here we present systematic experiments and a unifying picture of these processes, based on our extension of the semi-classical three-step model. Further understanding of the generation and coherent control of time-synchronized transients with photon energies from meV to 1 keV can lead to numerous technological advances and to an intriguing possibilities of ultra-broadband investigations into complex condensed matter systems.publishe