Effects of temperature environment on ranging accuracy of lidar

Comparing to microwave radar, there are many advantages of Lidar including higher measure accuracy, finer time and space resolution, smaller volume, lighter mass. Lidar has become a very important method in high precision remote sensing domain in space. At home and abroad, Lidar has been made widely applied in space rendezvous and docking of spacecraft. Ranging accuracy is one of the important indicators of Lidar performance. The ranging precision of Lidar will be affected by temperature environment when used in space. In this paper, the results show that the value of rang measured becomes bigger and bigger as environment temperature increasing. When the temperature changes from 20°C to 60°C, the time delay between emitting and receiving optical signal increases 6.8 ns, which means the range measured increasing 1.02 m. This change will induce great influence to rendezvous and docking process when working at short range. Therefore, it is necessary to give a reasonable value on temperature control when Lidar working on-orbit to satisfy the indicator of ranging accuracy.