Measuring atmospheric dispersion employing avalanche photodiodes

Ulrich Schreiber; Wolfgang Maier; Stefan Riepl

doi:10.1117/12.195848

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9 December 1994 Measuring atmospheric dispersion employing avalanche photodiodes

Ulrich Schreiber, Wolfgang Maier, Stefan Riepl

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Proceedings Volume 2310, Lidar Techniques for Remote Sensing; (1994) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.195848
Event: Satellite Remote Sensing, 1994, Rome, Italy

Abstract

The accuracy of today's satellite laser ranging system is limited to a few cm. A significant part of this range error is due to the limitations of the atmospheric correction model. A dual color ranging experiment has been designed to investigate this source of error. When ranging to satellites at the fundamental and second harmonic frequency of a Nd:YAG laser, two different pulse round trip times are obtained simultaneously. The infrared pulse is detected by an avalanche photodiode, operated in the `Geiger mode', while the green pulse is recorded by a microchannel plate photomultiplier. For a given satellite pass, the jitter in recording the time of flight of the pulse is too high to calculate an atmospheric correction from individual measurements. Due to the many shots per satellite pass, the scatter can be significantly reduced by applying a nonlinear least squares fitting procedure to the data. The results of a large number of satellite passes are compared with the predictions of the Marini-Murray model.

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Ulrich Schreiber, Wolfgang Maier, and Stefan Riepl "Measuring atmospheric dispersion employing avalanche photodiodes", Proc. SPIE 2310, Lidar Techniques for Remote Sensing, (9 December 1994); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.195848

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