Development of Reprogrammable High Frame-Rate Detector Devices for Laser Communication Pointing, Acquisition and Tracking

A two terminal laser communication test bed has been developed at The Aerospace Corporation. This paper presents the design and preliminary results of a reprogrammable detector within the Test Bed for use in pointing, acquisition, and tracking between a satellite-to- satellite laser communication link. The detector may be commanded by an emulated spacecraft Command & Data Handling subsystem to switch between full-array scanning and "small sized" N x M pixel Field of View (FOV) for high-rate laser tracking. The approach follows a parallel path to implement the signal processing algorithm on two different hardware resources: a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and a Digital Signal Processor (DSP). The focus of this effort is to present a methodology for testing and evaluating various techniques for advanced focal plane array (FPA) hardware, as well as sensor FPA control, image processing and laser beam X & Y position algorithms.