Ground based laser ranging for satellite location

In this article, we describe a new satellite laser ranging capability which is a joint effort between the Naval Research Laboratory and Air Force Optical Tracking Facility at Malabar, Florida. Initial measurements off LAGEOS indicate that uncorrected radial range rms values of 8 mm are readily achievable. The number of photoelectron counts are on the order of 180 which are off by an order of magnitude from predicted values.