Possible alternative acquisition scheme for the gravity recovery and climate experiment follow-on-type mission

An alternative acquisition scheme is introduced. The principle is to modulate power of the laser at a frequency within the photodiode’s bandwidth so that the photodiode in each satellite can detect the laser signal from the other satellite incoherently. Therefore, we can disentangle the degrees of freedom, two laser pointing directions per space craft and one frequency offset. Despite the employment of downlink and uplink data transferring, the total scanning time could be reduced from several hours to 160 s.