SIGMA SPACE CORPORATION
The Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS) is a medium/high-altitude wide-swath laser altimeter that has, for over a decade, demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in measuring vegetation structure, and topography of land, oceans, ice sheets, and sea ice. The intent of this effort is to create a new version of the LVIS instrument capable of the same level of performance as the current LVIS instrument, but modified for operations in a high-altitude, autonomous environment. The design will be based on the existing LVIS instrument, and will utilize several component designs (i.e. the aircraft structure, the pressure enclosure, and the data system) that were recently developed for the Cloud Precipitation LIDAR (CPL) on the Global Hawk. The new LVIS-GH instrument will incorporate some of the latest in NASA- and commercially-developed lasers, detectors, digitizers, and imaging systems resulting in an autonomous, high-altitude, wide-swath, full-waveform laser altimeter for use in the NASA Global Hawk aircraft. This effort will provide the mechanical, electrical, optical, thermal infrastructure and hardware, aircraft mounting structure, and electrical control and data collection system for this instrument. Further, this effort will include the integration of several Government-provided components and subsystems (i.e. laser system, digitizer hardware, and GPS/INS position and attitude measurement system) for integration and ground-based testing of the entire system on the Global Hawk aircraft.