Session
Technical Session V: New Mission Concepts
Abstract
The Vegetation Canopy Lidar (VCL) mission will be the first mission under the aegis of NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP). The mission will pioneer the execution of important science, in a short time period, with modest investment from the sponsoring organization. The mission team is a unique blend. The Principal Investigator, the science team, and ground operations is comprised of staff and students at the University of Maryland. The program management, and ground station development is performed by Omitron Incorporated. The satellite bus is designed, and developed, by Orbital Sciences Corporation. The mission funding, and science instrument integration, is provided by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The purpose of the mission is to fill the gaps in our global understanding of Earth's vegetation land cover. VCL will characterize the three dimensional structure of land cover for ecosystem/climate modeling, monitoring, and prediction. Important land cover parameters are poorly represented by currently available data, and the VCL mission will address the need for global quantitative data. During the design phase, VCL has encountered increases in the power requirements requested by the payload. The subsequent lesson learned was that the consequences affect nearly every spacecraft subsystem.
VCL: The Vegetation Canopy Lidar Mission
The Vegetation Canopy Lidar (VCL) mission will be the first mission under the aegis of NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP). The mission will pioneer the execution of important science, in a short time period, with modest investment from the sponsoring organization. The mission team is a unique blend. The Principal Investigator, the science team, and ground operations is comprised of staff and students at the University of Maryland. The program management, and ground station development is performed by Omitron Incorporated. The satellite bus is designed, and developed, by Orbital Sciences Corporation. The mission funding, and science instrument integration, is provided by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The purpose of the mission is to fill the gaps in our global understanding of Earth's vegetation land cover. VCL will characterize the three dimensional structure of land cover for ecosystem/climate modeling, monitoring, and prediction. Important land cover parameters are poorly represented by currently available data, and the VCL mission will address the need for global quantitative data. During the design phase, VCL has encountered increases in the power requirements requested by the payload. The subsequent lesson learned was that the consequences affect nearly every spacecraft subsystem.
