Laboratory atmospheric compensation experiment

Abstract

This paper describes an in-house experiment that was perfonned at the Avco Research LabsfFextron to test a proprietary atmospheric phase compensation algorithm. Since the laser energies of interest were small enough that thermal blooming was not an issue, it was only necessary to simulate the effect of atmospheric turbulence. This was achieved by fabricating phase screens that mimicked Kolmogorov phase statistics. A simulated atmosphere was constructed from these phase screens and the phase at the simulated ground was measured with a digital heterodyne interferometer. The result of this effort was an initial verification of our proprietary algorithm two years before the field experiment.