A multi-purpose SAIL demonstrator design and its principle experimental verification

A fully 2-D synthetic aperture imaging ladar (SAIL) demonstrator is designed and being fabricated to experimentally investigate and theoretically analyze the beam diffraction properties, antenna function, imaging resolution and signal processing algorithm of SAIL. The design details of the multi-purpose SAIL demonstrator are given and, as the first phase, a laboratory-scaled SAIL system based on bulk optical elements has been built to verify the principle of design, which is similar in construction to the demonstrator but without the major antenna telescope. The system has the aperture diameter of about 1mm and the target distance of 3.2m. © 2009 SPIE.