CLPS Mission Design Trade-Offs

[edzieba]

On the topic of physical contact sensors and other 'old school' ways of doing things, what's the status of radar for range detection during terminal descent? Given the ... technical difficulties ... with lidar lasers, not to mention their cost, is lidar really a design solution superior to radar?

LIDAR is nice as it gives you pretty precise range at a specific angle for relatively low power - and, depending on the LIDAR module, can do so in a wide array to start generating a point-cloud - with low latency. RADAR generally has higher power requirements, antenna design constrains your choice of wide-coverage-low-resolution or high-resolution-low-coverage (beam angle) and slewing an antenna or dish is much slower than slewing a mirror. RADAR has its advantages is being less dependant on optical surface properties (though surfaces have varying RF properties too). Tricks like SAR can up resolution, but at a hit to latency.
Having both is nice. Having both is not always within your mass budget or power budget (or budget budget).