Laser radar: from early history to new trends

The first steps of laser radar are discussed with the examples from range finding and designation. The followed successes in field tests and further fast development provided their wide use. Coherent laser radar, developed almost simultaneously, tried the ideas from microwaves including chirp technology for pulse compression, and Doppler mode of operation. This latter found a unique implementation in a cruise missile. In many applications, environmental studies very strongly rely upon the lidars sensing the wind, temperature, constituents, optical parameters. Lidars are used in the atmosphere and in the sea water measurements. Imaging and mapping is an important role prescribed to ladars. One of the prospective trends in laser radar development is incorporation of range and velocity data into the image information. Deep space program, even having not come to the finish, gave a lot for 3D imaging. Gated imaging, as one of the 3D techniques, demonstrated its prospects (seeing through scattering layers) for military and security usage. Synthetic aperture laser radar, which had a long incubation period, started to show first results, at least in modeling. Coherent laser radar baptized as the optical coherence tomography, along with the position sensitive laser radar, synthetic aperture laser radar, multispectral laser radar demonstrated very pragmatic results in the micro-scale applications.