Complex Field Sensing and Control with Fiber-Array-Based Collett-Wolf Beacon for Navy Tactical HEL Applications

To address the Navy need for a new, high-energy laser (HEL) sensor system that will simultaneously measure the phase and intensity distributions under the extreme atmospheric turbulence conditions that are common for Navy aircraft and ship-based offensive and defensive applications; Optonicus proposes the development of a Mission-Oriented Reconfigurable Speckle-Average Phase Retrieval (MOR-SAPR) wavefront sensor system utilizing the Collett-Wolf (C-W) beacon target illuminator approach based on the fast scanning of the combined beam of a coherent fiber-array laser transmitter. The MOR-SAPR wavefront senor can be reconfigured on the fly in a fraction of a second and hence utilized for ship and air target engagements with a wide range of spatial resolution, bandwidth, and speckle mitigation requirements in a single reconfigurable sensor. In Phase I, Optonicus has demonstrated feasibility through analysis of the MOR-SAPR complex field system concept. In Phase II, Optonicus will develop a prototype MOR-SAPR sensor system and test it in laboratory and field experiments over a 7-km atmospheric propagation path. In Phase III, Optonicus will transition the technology to commercial and DoD applications in air, sea and land based platforms.