NGSLR's Measurement of the Retro-Reflector Array Response of Various LEO to GNSS Satellites

NASA's Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging System (NGSLR) has successfully demonstrated daylight and night-time tracking this year to satellites from LEO to GNSS orbits, using a 7-8 arcsecond beam divergence, a 43% QE Hamamatsu MCP-PMT with single photon detection, a narrow field of view (11 arcseconds), and a 1 mJ per pulse 2kHz repetition rate laser. We have compared the actual return rates we are getting against the theoretical link calculations, using the known system configuration parameters, an educated guess at the sky clarity, and signal processing to extract the measured signal from the background noise.