Imaging LIDAR |
Imaging LIDAR |
May 19 2008, 10:00 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 213 Joined: 21-January 07 From: Wigan, England Member No.: 1638 |
Under contract from NASA, Rochester Institute of Technology is developing an imaging LIDAR for planetary mapping. Swaths of entire scenes with an accuracy of 1 cm?! Sweet!
-------------------- "I got a call from NASA Headquarters wanting a color picture of Venus. I said, “What color would you like it?” - Laurance R. Doyle, former JPL image processing guy
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May 19 2008, 10:16 PM
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#2
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8783 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
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.
-------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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May 20 2008, 04:50 AM
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#3
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Member Group: Members Posts: 184 Joined: 2-March 06 Member No.: 692 |
Under contract from NASA, Rochester Institute of Technology is developing an imaging LIDAR for planetary mapping. Swaths of entire scenes with an accuracy of 1 cm?! Sweet! To make this a practical tool, we need laser com. to earth. How close are we? Brian |
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May 20 2008, 06:42 AM
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#4
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14431 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
To make this a practical tool, we need laser com. to earth. Not really - I did a blog entry from Valencia in 2006 about upgrades to RF comms that are coming online. There is a 180w Ka band transmitter ready to fly at JPL. Combine that with a 3m dish on the spacecraft and a 70m DSN dish, you would get 8 to 20 Mbps (4x MRO's performance) Upgrade the DSN to the proposed 400 x 12m dish arrays, and put a 6m dish on the spacecraft - then you can do 320 Mbps from Mars to Earth. |
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May 20 2008, 07:51 AM
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#5
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
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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