Abstract

Recently several space-based lidar systems have been proposed. These systems include a coherent lidar, WINDSAT, proposed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to measure global winds and incoherent lidars proposed by NASA Langley Research Center and the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory (AFGL) to perform atmospheric research. This paper presents results of a study¹ performed by Lockheed, Perkin-Elmer and NOAA to determine the feasibility of performing both incoherent and coherent missions with a single space-based lidar system. Cost efficient ways of combining incoherent and coherent applications using the same space-based lidar have been developed.