Long View

Program Manager: Dr. Jennifer Ricklin

The Long View program will develop an inverse synthetic aperture LADAR that will enable the high-resolution imaging of geostationary satellites when coupled to a large aperture telescope. Specifically, the technologies being developed in the Long View program are an optical reference oscillator that is stable over the propagation time to a geostationary satellite (GEOSTAT) and back (about a quarter of a second) and auto focus algorithms that restore image quality that has been degraded due to atmospheric turbulence and optical reference oscillator instability over the imaging time (about 100 seconds). These two technologies are required in order to make inverse synthetic aperture LADAR systems feasible for objects in geostationary orbits.