ANALYSIS AND SIMULATION OF A SYNTHETIC-APERTURE TECHNIQUE FOR IMAGINGTHROUGH A TURBULENT MEDIUM

Active imaging techniques offer the promise of improved signal-to-nois e ratios for high-resolution imaging of distant objects. However, this promise has remained unfulfilled because such techniques typically re quire relatively high-power illumination. The proposed technique, refe rred to as Fourier telescopy, largely overcomes such limitations by en coding image information in the time domain, allowing very large total collector areas to be used. The basic approach combines long-baseline interferometry with phase closure to sample the object at high spatia l frequency but low temporal frequency. A phase closure strategy is se lected that maximizes the intermittency of transmission, further reduc ing illuminator power requirements. Error sources are analyzed, and si mulation results are presented for imaging of remote objects. Asymptot ic results are given for the lowest-order effects of atmospheric aberr ations, and the limitations of the approximations are discussed. (C) 1 996 Optical Society of America