HOLDON

Lidar remote sensing of the earth’s atmosphere is one of the main challenges in coping with the effects and causes of global warming caused by the emission of greenhouse gases. The present operating Lidar missions are all implanted on large satellite platforms due to the size of the telescope and high energy laser modules required to ensure a sufficient collection of light to extract the signal from the detector noise. The principal objective of HOLDON project is to develop a new detection chain which will improve the performance of the Lidars on large platforms and/or reduce the Lidar payload to be integrated in the future micro and mini-satellites. The performance increase is obtained by the optimization of HgCdTe avalanche photodiodes that will be hybridized to a CMOS Readout Circuit providing two operation modes and designed to meet the most demanding requirements for Lidar applications in terms of sensitivity, dynamic range and temporal resolution. To achieve these goals, a team of 7 partners, leaders in the different fields related to Lidar missions, will collaborate (4 represented EU member states). To this end, three ambitious objectives are defined: • Design and built a cutting-edge photon noise limited Lidar detection chain • Validate adequation between detection chain key performances and future space mission requirements • Demonstrate the improvement achieved with the cutting-edge detection chain for greenhouse gases detection COMPET-2-2017 aims at supporting project developing new technologies, systems and sub-systems for Earth observation in a relevant environment. According to this call, HOLDON project addresses i) “Detector technolog y and complete detection chain enhancement in the domains of CMOS and Infrared for Earth observations”, ii) “Sensors and mission concepts delivering high accuracy parameters for emission measurements.