Experimental Investigation of Atmospheric Induced Beam Jitter

Authors

• Matthew Kalensky, University of Notre Dame
• Eric J. Jumper, University of Notre Dame
• Stanislav Gordeyev, University of Notre Dame
• Aaron J. Archibald, Air Force Institute of Technology
• Matthew R. Kemnetz, Air Force Research Laboratory

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-11-2021

Abstract

AAOL-BC was employed to conduct experiments which sought to measure atmospheric induced jitter on a laser beam. Wavefronts were collected for a laser beam which was propagated between two aircraft at varying altitudes and separations. A data processing procedure for extracting the turbulence induced jitter is presented and the resulting jitter and higher order wavefront aberrations were used to extract turbulence parameters such as Cn2 and r0. The resulting turbulence quantities using these various approaches are compared with literature. It was shown that data collected at lower altitudes and large aircraft separations resulted in up to 5 urad of tilt onto the laser beam. Using the measured atmospheric induced jitter, Cn2 values were extracted which lined up well with models prevalent in literature, such as HV57. Values of Cn2 which were approximated using higher order wavefront statistics were generally higher than what is predicted by turbulence models due to contamination from the aero-optical and aero-acoustical environments around the aircraft.

Comments

Conference Session: Airborne and Atmospheric Measurement Techniques

AIAA Paper 2021-0334

The full paper is available from the publisher by subscription or purchase, using the DOI link below.

DOI

10.2514/6.2021-0334

Source Publication

AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum

Recommended Citation

Kalensky, M., Jumper, E., Gordeyev, S., Archibald, A., & Kemnetz, M. R. (2021, January). Experimental Investigation of Atmospheric Induced Beam Jitter. AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum. https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-0334