The Laser Ranging Interferometer (LRI) instrument on the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) Follow-On mission has provided the first laser interferometeric range measurements between remote spacecraft, separated by approximately 220 km. Autonomous controls that lock the laser frequency to a cavity reference and establish the 5 degree of freedom two-way laser link between remote spacecraft succeeded on the first attempt. Active beam pointing based on differential wavefront sensing compensates spacecraft attitude fluctuations. The LRI has operated continuously without breaks in phase tracking for more than 50 days, and has shown biased range measurements similar to the primary ranging instrument based on microwaves, but with much less noise at a level of 1 nm/ √ Hz at Fourier frequencies above 100 mHz.

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On mission will use a phase-locked loop to track changes in the phase of an optical signal that has been transmitted hundreds of kilometers between two spacecraft. Beam diffraction significantly reduces the received signal power, making it difficult to track, as the phase-locked loop is more susceptible to cycle slips. The lowest reported weak-light phase locking is at 40 fW with a cycle slip rate of 1 cycle per second. By selecting a phase-locked loop bandwidth that minimized the signal variance due to shot noise and laser phase fluctuations, a 30 fW signal has been tracked with a cycle slip rate less than 0.01 cycles per second. This is tracking at a power 25% lower with a 100-fold improvement in the cycle slip rate. This capability will enable a new class of missions, opening up new opportunities for space-based interferometry.

Abstract:We experimentally demonstrate an inter-satellite laser link acquisition scheme for GRACE Follow-On. In this strategy, dedicated acquisition sensors are not required-instead we use the photodetectors and signal processing hardware already required for science operation. To establish the laser link, a search over five degrees of freedom must be conducted (± 3 mrad in pitch/yaw for each laser beam, and ± 1 GHz for the frequency difference between the two lasers). This search is combined with a FFT-based peak detection algorithm run on each satellite to find the heterodyne beat note resulting when the two beams are interfered. We experimentally demonstrate the two stages of our acquisition strategy: a ± 3 mrad commissioning scan and a ± 300 µrad reacquisition scan. The commissioning scan enables each beam to be pointed at the other satellite to within 142 µrad of its best alignment point with a frequency difference between lasers of less than 20 MHz. Scanning over the 4 alignment degrees of freedom in our commissioning scan takes 214 seconds, and when combined with sweeping the laser frequency difference at a rate of 88 kHz/s, the entire commissioning sequence completes within 6.3 hours. The reacquisition sequence takes 7 seconds to complete, and optimizes the alignment between beams to allow a smooth transition to differential wavefront sensing-based auto-alignment.

The technical embodiment of the Huygens-Fresnel principle, an optical phased array (OPA) is an arrangement of optical emitters with relative phases controlled to create a desired beam profile after propagation. One important application of an OPA is coherent beam combining (CBC), which can be used to create beams of higher power than is possible with a single laser source, especially for narrow linewidth sources. Here we present an all-fiber architecture that stabilizes the relative output phase by inferring the relative path length differences between lasers using the small fraction of light that is back-reflected into the fiber at the OPA's glass-air interface, without the need for any external sampling optics. This architecture is compatible with high power continuous wave laser sources (e.g., fiber amplifiers) up to 100 W per channel. The high-power compatible internally sensed OPA was implemented experimentally using commercial 15 W fiber amplifiers, demonstrating an output RMS phase stability of λ/194, and the ability to steer the beam at up to 10 kHz.