Imaging through atmospheric turbulence for laser based C-RAM systems: an analytical approach

Kurzfassung

High Energy Laser weapons (HEL) have unique attributes which distinguish them from limitations of kinetic energy weapons. HEL weapons engagement process typical starts with identifying the target and selecting the aim point on the target through a high magnification telescope. One scenario for such a HEL system is the countermeasure against rockets, artillery or mortar (RAM) objects to protect ships, camps or other infrastructure from terrorist attacks. For target identification and especially to resolve the aim point it is significant to ensure high resolution imaging of RAM objects. During the whole ballistic flight phase the knowledge about the expectable imaging quality is important to estimate and evaluate the countermeasure system performance. Hereby image quality is mainly influenced by unavoidable atmospheric turbulence. Analytical calculations have been taken to analyze and evaluate image quality parameters during an approaching RAM object. In general, Kolmogorov turbulence theory was implemented to determine atmospheric coherence length and isoplanatic angle. The image acquisition is distinguishing between long and short exposure times to characterize tip/tilt image shift and the impact of high order turbulence fluctuations. Two different observer positions are considered to show the influence of the selected sensor site. Furthermore two different turbulence strengths are investigated to point out the effect of climate or weather condition. It is well known that atmospheric turbulence degenerates image sharpness and creates blurred images. Investigations are done to estimate the effectiveness of simple tip/tilt systems or low order adaptive optics for laser based C-RAM systems.