Design, Characterization, and Implementation of Optical Systems for Remote Sensing of the Atmosphere and Astrophysical Objects

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the optical design and characterization for two distinct remote sensing applications. The first application is focused on the high precision optical phase correction for the photonic Local Oscillator (LO) designed for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). The phase instability in the original fiber optics design scheme is characterized and a novel, singlemode fiber-based interferometric approach to measure and actively zero out the unwanted Photonic LO phase drift is introduced. The proposed technique is implemented and characterized by using a 16 km baseline with a two element array. In the second application, the first iteration of the quasioptics design used in the ATOMMS instrument is characterized. (ATOMMS-Active Temperature, Ozone and Moisture Microwave Spectrometer-is the pathfinding implementation of an Earth and Space Atmosphere Global Remote Sensing Instrument).The diffraction problems in this design which were limiting the instrument performance were analyzed. Then different design concepts to mitigate these limitations and optimize system performance are presented.