Paper Session I-C - Lidar in Space- The First Flight

Lidar is an acronym for light detection and ranging and refers to a technique for profiling atmospheric parameters using lasers and a time-of-flight ranging technique. Lidars were first used to study the Earth\u27s atmosphere in the early 1960\u27s following the development of the first pulsed lasers. Since then many advances in technology and application have occurred and lidars are commonly deployed in ground-based and aircraft-based measurement programs worldwide. These efforts have focused on a variety of studies, including, range-resolved measurements of the structure and optical properties of aerosols and clouds, distributions of trace gases such as ozone and water vapor, tropospheric winds, and atmospheric density and temperature. Lidars in Earth orbit have long been considered a potentially attractive way to perform many of these measurements on a global basis and, over the past 20 years, a number of studies have been made concerning satellite and shuttle based systems (see, for instance, Atmospheric, Magnetospheric, and Plasmas in Space (AMPS) Payload for Spacelab/Shuttle (ref. 1)). However, it was not until September of 1994 that the first lidar was operated in Earth orbit when the Lidar In-Space Technology Experiment (LITE) was flown on Space Shuttle Discovery