Advanced Tracking in High Scintillation

Conventional tracking schemes have reached their performance limit for systems such as the Airbone Laser operating in deep turbulence environments. The next generation of high precision tracking systems must exploit all information available to producethe desired track correction. The Phase I SBIR effort identified the significant tracking performance degraders in high scintillation. It was illustrated that the tracking problem cannot be decoupled from the pointing problem and that optimal performanceis available by integrating the tracking with the adative optics architecture. This effort will develop such an integrated architecture and evaluate it in analysis and wave optics simulation. A field test at NOP (North Oscura Peak) or another governmenttest facility will complete the performance assessment.