THOR Lidar
Time period
Spring 2000
Project description
THOR stands for THickness from Offbeam Returns.
This Lidar system is designed to estimate the thickness of clouds
by measuring the size of the reflected halo resulting from a
laser entering a cloud. A refractive telescope with approximately
7.5-inch (19.05-centimeter) aperture is used to gather the returned
light and collect it into a custom designed fiber optic bundle.
The fiber optic bundle routes specific sections of the light
focused by the telescope into ten Hamamatsu detectors.
The THOR Lidar system is now being prepared
for test flights in the NASA Wallops P-3 aircraft. |