Impact of a New Highly Sensitive HgCdTe Avalanche Photodiode Detector on Receiver Performance for the CO2 Sounder Lidar for the ASCENDS Mission

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is currently developing a CO2 lidar as a candidate for the NASA's planned ASCENDS mission under the support of Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) Instrument Incubator Program (IIP). As part of this work we have demonstrated new type of lower noise HgCdTe avalanche photodiode (APD) multi-element detector for the lidar receiver. This significantly improves the receiver sensitivity, lower the laser power, and reduce the receiver telescope size compared to InGaAs photomultiplier tubes (PMT) and APDs currently used. The HgCdTe APD arrays were designed and manufactured by DRS Technologies, Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition (RSTA) Division, which combines their mature HgCdTe APD detector in a hybrid package with a new custom cryogenic silicon preamplifier. The new detectors were specially designed for our airborne CO2 lidar and operate at ~ 77K inside a turn-key closed-cycle cooler. The detector has 80 μm square pixels in a 4x4 array, and >70% fill factor and was custom designed to match the optics of our airborne and eventually space-based CO2 lidar. The initial results of evaluating the detector at NASA GSFC showed the HgCdTe APD assembly has a quantum efficiency of ~90% near 1550-nm, >500 APD gain, 8-10 MHz electrical bandwidth, and an average noise equivalent power of <1fW/Hz1/2. The detector also has a much wider linear dynamic range than PMTs, since it operates in a linear analog mode and has variable gain. Given the wide range of surface reflectivities this is important for ASCENDS. The new detector also greatly improves our CO2 lidar's receiver sensitivity. Calculations show it enables us to reduce the laser transmitter power by half for the space borne instrument while staying with a conventional reasonably sized (~1.2 m) diameter receiver telescope. We will show analysis and laboratory test results of the CO2 lidar performance using a receiver with this new detector. We are also funded by NASA ESTO to develop a high bandwidth HgCdTe APD under an Advanced Component Technology (ACT) program. DRS RSTA will use a new higher speed preamplifier and reduce the input capacitance to further reduce the noise and achieve linear mode photon counting performance.