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Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: Laser-Radar: Canadian Scientists Develop

*This from space.com's Astronotes section.  It's in updated, column format so must copy and paste.  I don't see this posted elsewhere and I'm putting it here as it deals with clouds and water vapor:

August 1

Canadian Scientists Test Laser-Radar for Mars

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia (AP) -- A unique laser-radar destined for the arctic plains of Mars is providing insight into the atmospheric conditions above Halifax by measuring aerosols, clouds, water vapor and temperatures.

But the team of researchers sifting through this data is excitedly awaiting the day they will fit their device, called a lidar, onto a space craft and blast it into the sky.

"This is just epic -- I love it," Tom Duck, one of the lead scientists on the project, says in his office at Dalhousie University's physics and atmospheric science department.

Duck is one of a handful of scientists at three Canadian universities designing and building the laser-radar, an innovative machine that will soon collect vital information about Mars' atmosphere.

The team says the device will beam a centimeter-wide laser from a spacecraft that lands on Mars for roughly 90 days after it touches down in 2008, following its launch 10 months earlier.

Good luck! 

--Cindy

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,428

Re: Laser-Radar: Canadian Scientists Develop

In stories posted to the weather thread,

From story Meteor dust affects climate?

More on a previously mentioned story.
Cosmic hole-in-one captured over Antarctica

What at first looked like an electronic glitch turned out to be a significant event in space, in fact, a cosmic hole-in-one.

What a powerful telescope had picked up as it stretched towards the night sky over Antarctica was the trail of dust left in the wake of the death of an asteroid.

Appears the scientist in the Antartica was setting up the Light Detection and Ranging or LIDAR a instrument that fires laser into the air and looks for reflection sort of simular to radar.