Abstract

Optical frequency combs in space bear the prospect of dramatically improving satellite navigation and they may pave the pathway for various space applications like satellite formation flights, global satellite navigation, earth observation, and satellite-based fundamental tests of physical constants [1]. Here we report on a precision ranging system based on a dual-comb architecture aiming for fast inter-satellite ranging for swarm navigation in space [2]. The challenge of this application is to combine long-distance ranging with micron-scale ranging on a millisecond time scale. The coherence of our ranging apparatus enables seamless combination of time-of-flight analysis and interferometric distance measurement on the same optical path [3]. In a single measurement, the precision resulting from the time-of-flight information is below a micron in 100 µs, and the optical phase analysis increases the precision to better than 3 nm after 2 ms of averaging time. This is a factor of 30 faster than previously reported [3].

© 2017 IEEE