Fast Airborne DE WFS

The DoD has pursued many projects to incorporate a laser weapon system on an aircraft.  The aerodynamic flow of the air through which the aircraft is moving creates its own set of aberrations.  These aero-optic aberrations can be of much higher spatial and temporal frequency that those observed in free-stream turbulence.  This aero-optic problem has been the subject of much research in recent years.  Existing wavefront sensor (WFS) technologies fall short in a combination of performance, simplicity, cost or compactness to address this problem. The Air Force requires the ability to detect the aero-optic and free-stream turbulence wavefront distortions at high bandwidth in order to compensate them using a high-bandwidth adaptive optics system. The system needs to meet stringent size, weight, and power requirements consistent with mounting on an aircraft.  To meet performance requirements the WFS to detect these distortions needs to run at a high sample rate.  In this proposal we seek to address this need using a combination of integrating recent significant developments, analyzing various WFS methodologies, and evaluating the application of compact low-latency digital electronics for high-speed processing and interface application.