DAWN Coherent Wind Profiling Lidar Flights on NASA's DC-8 During GRIP

2. NASA’s Requirement NASA frequently commissions the National Research Council (NRC) to provide external advice to NASA. The first NRC Decadal Survey for earth science mission advice to NASA was published in 2007. The NRC recommended 15 priority earth science missions for NASA implementation. One of these missions is global measurement of vertical profiles of the horizontal wind magnitude and direction, tersely called “3D Winds”. The NRC report agreed with the conclusions of previous studies by NASA and NOAA that the optimum sensor to provide the wind measurements is hybrid pulsed wind profiling lidar. Hybrid refers to having both coherent and direct detection wind lidars working in tandem to take advantage of their complementarities in covering the troposphere. NASA has been developing both of these sensors for many years. Since NASA’s space missions are very expensive, NASA is very sensitive to the risk to the mission of the proposed technology. Proposals must show a sufficiently high technology readiness level (TRL) of each technology. In practical terms, for lidar systems headed to space, NASA prefers airborne demonstration of very similar technology; and measurement technique, sensitivity, and accuracy as is being proposed for space.