[X] My Assistant

[Del Palmer]

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!

[edstrick]

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).