Broadband light source for fiber-optic measurement system in spaceborne applications

Measuring temperatures, mechanical loads and derived quantities precisely and reliably play an important role in spaceflight. With spacecraft becoming increasingly complex, upscaling of present telemetry techniques can become cumbersome. Additionally, there are entirely new sensory requirements, resulting from emerging technologies such as smart structures, active vibration damping and composite material health monitoring. It has been demonstrated in preceding studies that these measurements can be advantageously and efficiently carried out by means of fiber-optic systems. The most prominent fiber-optic strain and temperature sensor is the fiber Bragg grating. Typically, multiple fiber Bragg gratings are used to translate entire temperature and strain fields into an optical wavelength information. For the interrogation of these sensors, a broadband or scanning light source is required. Additional requirements with respect to the light source are high intensity and unpolarized illumination of the gratings. These constraints can be met by a light source that is based on amplified spontaneous emission in a rare-earth-doped fiber. In the presented work, a compact light source, adapted for measurement applications and targeted towards space applications, has been developed. The design of this light source is presented, as well as its implementation. The light source has been designed and tested for selected core aspects of space robustness and the results of these tests are summarized.     

Phase Monopulse Error Due to Nonuniform Noise Background

A phase monopulse antenna system can be used for the high accuracy tracking of active or passive objects in space or on earth. Far-field noise sources that are present in the background of the object being tracked will introduce an offset or bias error in the determination of the angle of incidence of the coherent sinusoidal wave received from the source. The dependency of this bias error upon the nonuniformity of the noise background or equivalently upon the asymmetry of the antenna patterns about the direction to the signal being tracked is determined. Although the variance in the measurement of the sinusoidal source direction can be reduced by increasing the post detection integration time, it is shown that the bias or offset error is unaffected by this change. In order to decrease the offset or bias error the predetection bandwidth must be reduced.