Influence of atmospheric turbulence on planetary transceiver laser ranging

In this paper we investigate the influence of atmospheric turbulence on the performance of the uplink of a planetary transceiver laser ranging system using a single photon detector. We numerically combine the influence of turbulence in the mean intensity profile variations, scintillation, beam-wander induced pointing errors and stochastic time-of-flight variations, using the Hufnagel–Valley turbulence profile to model the ground turbulence behavior. We map the intensity variations due to turbulence to variations in the probability distribution of the arrival time of the 1st photon in a laser pulse, which influences the range measurement error probability distribution. The turbulence models are applied to assess the influence on single-pass range accuracy and precision statistics, as well as the parameter estimation quality of a Phobos Laser Ranging (PLR) mission.