Satellite signatures on multi-photon laser ranging system

The size of the artificial satellite itself has become one of the serious error sources in the technique of satellite laser ranging. Skewness is found in the postfit residuals of the actual ranging data to the geodetic satellite Ajisai, though the internal calibration data shows no skewness. The numerical simulation, generating the waveforms of return signals and the statistics of the return epoch, clearly explains this reason on a multi-photon detector system. This effect is found to be caused by not skewness in each return waveform, but skewness in the statistics in return epochs. A new method to correct the bias error is also discussed