LED minilidar for Mars rover

A mini-lidar to observe the activity of Martian atmosphere is developed. The 10cm-cube LED mini-lidar was designed to be onboard a Mars rover. The light source of the mini-lidar is a high powered LED of 385nm. LED was adopted as light source because of its toughness against circumference change and physical shock for launch. The pulsed power and the pulse repetition frequency of LED beam were designed as 0.75W (=7.5nJ/10ns) and 500kHz, respectively. Lidar echoes were caught by the specially designed Cassegrain telescope, which has the shorter telescope tube than the usual to meet the 10cm-cube size limit. The high-speed photon counter was developed to pursue to the pulse repetition frequency of the LED light. The measurement range is no shorter than 30m depending back-ground condition. Its spatial resolution was improved as 0.15m (=1ns) by this photon counter. The demonstrative experiment was conducted at large wind tunnel facility of Japan Meteorological Agency. The measurement target was smoke of glycerin particles. The smoke was flowed in the wind tunnel with wind speed of 0 – 5m. Smoke diffusion and its propagation due to the wind flow were observed by the LED mini-lidar. This result suggests that the developed lidar can pursue the structure and the motion of dust devil of >2m.