Researchers are enhancing lidar tech for increased versatility, which benefits scientists and explorers in remote sensing, surveying, mapping, 3D-image scanning, hazard detection, and navigation. Lidar, a remote sensing device, employs light pulses to detect distances and object attributes precisely. With continuous investigations, its precision and versatility make it critical for communication, navigation, planetary exploration, and space operations.
Researchers are working on a deployable telescope that will employ flat-panel optics in foldable, origami-inspired panels. The goal is to deliver lidar tech to future missions without the high cost and limited efficiency of present technologies. The team aims to achieve the best possible balance of high performance and small, light, and power-efficient packaging.
Lidar receivers rely on large lenses to capture light, making lidar equipment hefty. Flat optics researchers are researching exploiting nano-structured materials to manipulate individual photons, allowing thin, lightweight optics to fulfill duties formerly reserved for bulkier, more expensive three-dimensional counterparts. They want to create instruments that are more flexible and agile and have superior size, weight, and power trade-offs.
Researchers are working on a lidar device that generates various wavelengths of light from a single beam, which would improve accuracy. The CASALS, or Concurrent Artificially Intelligent Spectrometry and Adaptive Lidar System, changes the wavelength using a high-speed laser pulse, resulting in a broom-like array that minimizes the instrument’s size.
CASALS is smaller than a normal lidar instrument, in addition to being more efficient. CASALS might aid in higher-density mapping of Earth and other planets and moons, as well as autonomous descents and landings. Flat optics and wavelength scanning offer new possibilities for lidar tech and are part of a series of studies that are likely to open up new possibilities in science and navigation to other worlds, they said.
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