FREEDOM PHOTONICS LLC — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: S1.07

FREEDOM PHOTONICS LLC — SBIR Phase I award from National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Amount
$117,506
Agency
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Program / Phase
SBIR · Phase I
Topic
S1.07
NAICS
Place of performance
CA
Period
2016-06-10 → 2016-12-09

Description

Methane is about 23 times more potent at trapping infrared radiation than carbon dioxide. The development of low-cost, accurate remote methane sensing technologies is becoming increasingly critical with the need to accurately analyze methane concentrations and distributions throughout the atmosphere. A "Laser Sounder" method is successfully used for carbon dioxide detection, and it utilizes a commercial, telecom grade tunable laser. In this program, we propose to develop a 1651 nm widely tunable laser, which will be based on wavelength scaling of our commercial, rad-hard tunable laser platform, currently available at 1300nm and 1550nm. This laser will allow the same LIDAR technique to be applied to Methane.