Potential commercial applications include: 1) Laboratory use of frequency-stabilized lasers; 2) Developmental work on the future flight systems; 3) Ground based telescope with adaptive optics; 4) Interferometry; 5) Spectroscopy instrumentation and science requiring an absolute wavelength standard; 6) Dye laser replacement scientific lasers; 7) injection seed laser requiring ultra-stable frequency stability. NASA has been planning many space missions, in which a space-qualifiable high reliability frequency-stabilized CW laser source will play an important role. These missions include LISA (Laser Interferometric Space Antenna), ICESat (Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite), LIST (Doppler Wind Lidar, Lidar for Surface Topography) ASCENDS (Earth and planetary atmospheric composition) and upgraded GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiments), terrestrial and space-based distributed aperture telescopes, interferometric instruments such as SIM and TFP (Space Interferometer Mission and Terrestrial Planet Finder) and general space-based metrology. All of these missions require laser sources with space qualification, high reliability, frequency stabilized having wavelengths in the region between 1.06 micron and 1.5 micron. Several near-term missions also require single frequency seed or local oscillator laser source with MHz linewidth, the requirement the proposed laser source can meet. These missions include global Doppler winds lidar and coherent sensing of atmospheric constituents such as CO2 and water vapor.
More »