Abstract

During the years 1989 to 1992 NASA/MSFC managed the Laser Atmospheric Wind Sounder (LAWS) project and selected two contractor teams to perform parallel Phase I and II studies, and parallel CO₂ laser breadboard demonstrations. The contractor teams were headed by GE Astro Space [1,2] and Lock-heed Missiles & Space Company [3,4]. At that time LAWS was part of NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) component of the Mission To Planet Earth (MTPE) program; and LAWS was required to fully profile the tropospheric wind velocity from the ground to 20 km altitude with accuracies near 1 m/s and vertical resolutions better than 1 km. The recommendations of both studies were similar and consisted of a coherent laser radar (lidar) employing an ~20 J, ~5 Hz, rare isotope CO₂ pulsed laser with an ~1.6 m diameter conically scanning telescope. The orbit was sun-synchronous at 525 km. During this time the paradigm shift to “faster, better, cheaper” and “smallsats” was occurring; and both the estimated costs and spacecraft accommodations for LAWS precluded mission approval. In Dec. 1993, LAWS was deselected from EOS.

© 1995 Optical Society of America