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.