Potential non-NASA commercial applications may include: 1) telescopes, 2) Injection seeders for pulsed lidar systems. There are currently NO flight qualified lasers available domestically, 3) Long range communication, requiring absolute wavelength stability, 4) Microwave Local Oscillators, 5) Spectrometer Instruments, 6)UAV, Spaceflight and Manned flight system, 7) Interferometry, 8) Spectroscopy instruments and science requiring an absolute wavelength standard, 9) Dye laser replacement scientific lasers, 10) Injection seed laser with superior absolute wavelength stability, 11) Ground based telescope utilizing adaptive optics.
NASA is planning space-based sensors, a critical component of which is the high reliability frequency-stabilized CW laser source. These missions include LISA (Laser Interferometric Space Antenna), 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, where ultrastable wavelength stability is the dominant requirement. These missions require lasers with sub-kHz linewidth at wavelengths from 1.06 to 1.5 micron. Several nearer-term missions also require single-frequency seed or local oscillator lasers with MHz linewidth. These missions include global Doppler winds lidar and coherent sensing of atmospheric constituents including CO2 and water vapor.
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