Under contract from NASA, Rochester Institute of Technology is developing an http://www.rit.edu/news/?r=46169 for planetary mapping. Swaths of entire scenes with an accuracy of 1 cm?! Sweet!
Nice, but it doesn't cite specific wavelengths of interest. Should work well for Mars or airless bodies regardless, but what about Venus or Titan? We need specific freqs to penetrate the clouds, and a 'one size fits all' instrument' does not seem feasible.
The press release talks about "optical and ultraviolet".... not at all specific.
For Lidar, you don't need a narrow optical bandpass, except to exclude scattered daylight, which adds up as noise. Just center a "narrow enough" bandpass around the laser frequency.
What's important here is that apparently they are talking about a sensor where each pixel reads out a continuous string of "brightness vs time delay" measurements, not just a single "brightest return was at such-and-such a time delay" reading. That ability's needed to do aerosols, like the upward pointed lidar on Phoenix, or Mars Global Surveyor's lidar (to some extent).
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