HERA LIDAR instrument Developement

Paulo Gordo ^1,2 David Seixas ² Bruno Couto ¹ Antonio Amorim ¹ Belegante Livio ³ Rui Melicio ⁴ Arlindo Marques ⁵ Tiago Sousa ⁵ Costa Pinto ⁵ Georgios Tzeremes ⁶ Patrick Michel ⁷ Michael Küppers ⁸ Ian Carnelli ⁹

¹Physics, Faculdade de Ciências Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
²Optics, ARMILAR Lda, Lisbon, Portugal
³Optoelectronics, National Institute of R&D, Romania
⁴Physics, ICT, Universidade de Évora, Evora, Portugal
⁵Aerospace, EFACEC, Porto, Portugal
⁶ESTEC, ESA, Noordwijk, Netherlands
⁷CNRS, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France
⁸ESAC, ESA, Madrid, Spain
⁹GPS, ESA, Paris, France

The AIDA (Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment) is an ESA and NASA mission, that aims to study asteroid deflection through a kinetic collision. For this mission two spacecrafts will be developed DART provided by NASA and HERA provided by ESA. DART spacecraft will collide with Didymoon, while the orbit change is monitored by ground stations. HERA spacecraft will study the post impact scenario. The HERA spacecraft is composed by the main spacecraft and two small CubeSats. HERA will study the asteroid with imaging, Radar, Satellite-to-Satellite Doppler tracking, Lidar, Seismometry and Gravimetry. In this abstract we report a first iteration on the LIDAR instrument that we called HELENA (HERA LIDAR ENGINEERING MODEL ALTIMETER).

HELENA is a TOF altimeter that provides time tagged distances and velocity measurements. The instrument can be used to support near asteroid navigation and provides scientific information (e.g. asteroid 3D topography, fall dawn velocity).

The development of this instrument is done in the frame of an ESA activity. The LIDAR design comprises a microchip laser and a low noise sensor. The synergies between these two technologies enable the development of a compact instrument for range measurements of up to 20Km.

In this work we report the design of the LIDAR, optics, opto-mechanics and electronics design, as well initial manufacture tasks.