LiDAR Technologies and Detector Solutions

Space mission like Aeolus has demonstrated how much LiDAR instruments can bring to the quality of the data gathered and therefore analysis and prediction that scientist can make. The design of a LiDAR detector comes with challenges. The main and most difficult performance to reach is the signal-to-noise ratio due to the weak level of the signal reflected. It requires a detector of the highest sensitivity. This paper will present the LiDAR detector used for Aeolus, the technologies developed to increase the sensitivity of such detector and finally more recent development of indirect Time-Of-Flight (iToF) at Teledyne-e2v.