Spaceborne lasers development for ALADIN instrument on board ADM-Aeolus ESA mission

Abstract

ALADIN TXA is the first in the world All-Solid-State, Compact, Transmitterlaser Assembly for the first in the world Doppler Wind Lidar inside the ESA Aeolus mission. Its optical architecture is that of a MOPA, medium energy, pulsed, frequency tripled, tunable, almost single transverse and single longitudinal mode Nd:YAG lasers with 50 Hz PRF and a three years in-orbit lifetime. A brief resume of the design, together with the qualification approach and the main experimental results obtained with the two flight models are presented. The main technological challenges faced during the program development and the lesson learnt for future space All-Solid-State lasers will complete the paper.