The 1.5 m telescope at the Starfire Optical Range, USAF Phillips Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM, USA is equipped with laser beacon adaptive optics and a high speed full aperture tilt correction system. The laser beacon is formed by a copper vapor laser propagated out the full 1.5 m aperture and focused at 14 km range. The laser operates at 5,000 pulses per second, 50 ns per pulse, with approximately 60-70 watts average power into the atmosphere. Light backscattered from the laser beacon between the ranges of 12 and 16 km is sensed by an unintensified, Pockels-cell-gated, silicon-based CCD Shack-Hartmann wave front sensor. The optics are configured such that it is also possible to use natural stars as beacons for the higher-order adaptive optics. Wave front corrections are applied to a 241 actuator continuous facesheet deformable mirror operated at approximately 100 Hz closed loop bandwidth.
The Absolute Radiometric Code (ARC) is a collection of Matlab functions tied together under a Matlab Graphical User Interface (GUI). ARC was developed as part ofthe Satellite Imaging Experiment (SIE) conducted by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Ki,iJand AFB, in order to get fast estimates of the Optical Cross Sections (OCS) of various satellites. ARC uses multiple star measurements to calculate the atmospheric and optical transmission ofthe system. The transmissions are then used to compute the optical cross section of an object. Generally, the optical transmission of a sensor system can be characterized quite well, so it serves as a sanity check on all ARC results. The atmospheric transmission changes considerably from night to night and even from hour to hour on the same night. ARC uses a collection of calibration stars at various elevation angles to determine the atmospheric transmission through the viewing times. The star calibration is generally taken several times during the experiment period.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.