Design of a direct-detection wind and aerosol lidar for mars orbit

Autor: Xiaoli Sun, Graham R. Allan, Haris Riris, Anthony W. Yu, Daniel R. Cremons, James B. Abshire, Floyd Hovis, Michael D. Smith, Scott D. Guzewich
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: CEAS Space Journal. 12:149-162
ISSN: 1868-2510
1868-2502
DOI: 10.1007/s12567-020-00301-z
Popis: The present knowledge of the Mars atmosphere is greatly limited by a lack of global measurements of winds and aerosols. Hence, measurements of height-resolved wind and aerosol profiles are a priority for new Mars orbiting missions. We have designed a direct-detection lidar (MARLI) to provide global measurements of dust, winds and water ice profiles from Mars orbit. From a 400-km polar orbit, the instrument is designed to provide wind and backscatter measurements with a vertical resolution of 2 km and with resolution of 2° in latitude along track. The instrument uses a single-frequency, seeded Nd:YAG laser that emits 4 mJ pulses at 1064 nm at a 250 Hz pulse rate. The receiver utilizes a 50-cm diameter telescope and a double-edge Fabry-Pérot etalon as a frequency discriminator to measure the Doppler shift of the aerosol-backscatter profiles. The receiver also includes a polarization-sensitive channel to detect the cross-polarized backscatter profiles from water ice. The receiver uses a sensitive 4 × 4 pixel HgCdTe avalanche photodiode array as a detector for all signals. Here we describe the measurement concept, instrument design, and calculate its performance for several cases of Mars atmospheric conditions. The calculations show that under a range of atmospheric conditions MARLI is capable of measuring wind speed profiles with random error of 2–4 m/s within the first three scale heights, enabling vertically resolved mapping of transport processes in this important region of the atmosphere.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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