Two missions, both power-scalable

Because the laser runs at low pressure, it emits on the unshifted rubidium line. The receiver can therefore carry a filter made from the same atom, a Faraday anomalous-dispersion optical filter. The filter’s few-picometer passband suppresses sunlight and sky background so strongly that the system operates in daylight. We call this solar-suppressed lidar.

The first application is space domain awareness. A ground-based system can illuminate and range centimeter-scale objects in low Earth orbit, to detect debris and keep track of it. The concept is described in published U.S. patent application 2025/0237750 and in our 2025 AMOS paper.

The same principle serves sensing on land, at sea, and in the air.

Short, bright pulses at kilohertz rates offer a different interaction with a target than continuous-wave illumination. In an invited paper at SPIE Sensors + Imaging (Security + Defence) in Edinburgh in September 2026, LiDAR Space asked whether the same pulsed source that serves the lidar can deliver ablative effects for counter-UAS. The paper is listed under Publications.

LiDAR Space is developing pulsed DPAL as a component for counter-UAS systems in cooperation with integrators.

Both missions scale with power. Average power in this regime scales primarily with diode count on a fixed architecture, in a single beam from a single aperture. The approach offers a path to higher average power without the thermal lens of solid-state lasers or the thermal and beam-quality limits of high-pressure alkali designs. The background is set out under Why DPAL.