2008 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program

opportunity in the fall has helped prepare for
HYSPIRI algorithm-development flights, to be
teamed again with MASTER flights planned
for 2009.
Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS)
The Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS)
payload package flew approximately 36 hours
on a B-200 in New Mexico, Nevada, and
California in 2008 in preparation for support
of the upcoming DESDynI mission. The
LVIS team also used this flight opportunity
to demonstrate a new 10-bit, high-speed
waveform digitizer that is being investigated
for use on the DESDynI Lidar, perform an
atmospheric delay experiment, and to collect
data along GLAS tracks and Long Valley
Caldera.
Full-waveform, 25 m footprint lidar data was
collected over a variety of vegetation cover
types and topographic slopes to determine
the impact of off-nadir pointing on measuring
vegetation canopy heights and vertical
structure with a lidar. Under the currently
planned design, the DESDynI mission consists
of a multi-beam, 25 m footprint lidar and an
Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar
(InSAR). If both instruments are flown on
the same spacecraft platform and in a short
repeat orbit, the lidar will need to point offnadir
by up to 16 degrees to achieve global
coverage at the required spatial resolution.
The data from this flight series is still being
analyzed. If this experiment, data, and the
associated modeling efforts determine that
the scientific impact of off-nadir pointing
is too large, then DESDynI will have to be
implemented as two separate spacecraft, one
for the InSAR and one for the lidar.
Advanced Carbon dioxide and Climate LAser
International Mission (ACCLAIM).
The ACCLAIM instrument flew locally on
the LaRC UC-12 (similar to the LaRC B-200)
on 11 flights between September 23 and
October 30, 2008. The flight tracks were
over southeastern Virginia and northeastern
North Carolina, and each flight lasted about
three hours (33.8 hours total). ACCLAIM
had also previously flown on the Learjet 25 in
2007.
The purpose of the campaign was to
conduct airborne validation of the remote
measurements of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) with
the ACCLAIM system. In situ measurements
of CO 2 were also made on this aircraft,
and spiral maneuvers were done at the
center of the flight track for comparison
with the remote ACCLAIM CO 2 column
measurements. This is a critical step in the
development and demonstration of the
laser/lidar system that is going to be used for
global measurements of CO 2 as part of the
ASCENDS (Active Sensing of CO 2 Emissions
over Nights, Days, and Seasons) mission.
The results from this flight campaign
demonstrated that the ACCLAIM instrument
can make CO 2 column measurements with
high precision and high accuracy (better than
0.75% or 3 ppm of CO 2 ). These were the
first high quality, remote, laser measurements
of CO 2 made from an airborne platform.
Swath Imaging Multi-polarization Photoncounting
Lidar (SIMPL)
SIMPL was flown on the Glenn Research
Center Learjet 25 in 2008 on an engineering
test flight to test electrical and mechanical
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