Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Open Access Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MS)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor 1

Michael Roggemann

Committee Member 1

Glen Archer

Committee Member 2

Timothy Schulz

Abstract

The potential to track and view objects in space from the ground with greater near real time knowledge of the intervening turbulence would be a revolutionary capability. The objective of this thesis is to cross-validate two separate methods used to estimate the Fried parameter. This verification is a step toward a commercial grade product that would make real-time estimates of the turbulence strength along an optical path from a ground-based observatory to a satellite in orbit around the Earth. Michigan Technological University has developed a multi-frame blind deconvolution (MFBD) algorithm used to estimate r0 and it was tested against MZA’s Delayed Tilt Anisoplanatism (DELTA) software. Important realizations about MFBD initialization parameters were made during this study. Key results from the study included that approximately 62% of the final MTU r0 estimates were in between the DELTA r0A and r0B estimates. Only 8.3% of all of the results are more than 1 cm outside of the r0A and r0B range. The outcome of these experiments has shown that overall the MTU results fall very close to or within the range of the estimated DELTA results.

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