Lidar technology pre-development in support of A-SCOPE, the ESA mission to measure CO_2 from space

摘要

Advanced Space Carbon and Climate Observation of Planet Earth (A-SCOPE) has been one of the six candidates for the third cycle of the Earth Explorer Core missions, selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) for assessment studies'. Earth Explorer missions focus on the science and research aspects of ESA's Living Planet Programme2. A-SCOPE mission aims at observing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO_2) for a better understanding of the carbon cycle. Knowledge about the spatial distribution of sources and sinks of COi with unprecedented accuracy will provide urgently needed process information about the global carbon cycle. In order to achieve both accuracy and high coverage, the A-SCOPE mission encompasses a new measurement technique based on a lidar. Though building on the efforts deployed by ESA since the early eighties in the advancement of critical technology for lidar systems, the proposed measurement concept based on an Integrated Path Differential Absorption (IPDA) lidar is highly innovative. Following a brief description of the proposed instrument implementation this paper reports on the status of the pre-development activities initiated in support of the instrument critical technologies for both the detector and the transmitter.