Fast Scanning LIDAR For Safe Landing On Planets

Landing on the moon, Mars or other planets safely is of great significance for the success of space exploration. Compared with the previous cameras and human vision to look for a safe landing area, LIDAR can quickly detect the undesired zone with gravels, craters, scarps and other dangerous features. A type of laser scanner, which is designed by Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (SITP) for safe landing on planets, is introduced. The single laser beam is expanded to linear beams through a cylindrical lens and the scanning direction is controlled by two-dimensional tilt mirrors. The reflected laser beams gather at avalanche diode detectors of the focal plane of telescope. The signal of every cell is processed individually and the planetary surface can be achieved by the fast two-dimensional scanning. At present, the designed linear array LIDAR is under prototype development, this paper describes its principle, and detection capability of single cell LIDAR for dangerous terrain.