CU Boulder's CIRES Lab Adapts Fe-Doppler Free LiDAR for NASA Rocket Campaign

CU Boulder's CIRES lab has been long-established and involved in the scientific community through its research at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Now the group faces a new challenge, establishing LiDAR setup in Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia to aid in a NASA-funded Rocket Campaign. Its challenge in this endeavor is to adapt the already existing Fe-Doppler Free spectroscopy, pioneered by Dr. Xinzhao Chu's lab, to best provide experimental data needed for NASA aerospace applications. To adequately surmise this project, the students must engineer a set-up capable of enabling the LiDAR devices to take data with high attitude repeatability, precision, and low-elevation pointing capability in order to provide accurate flight conditions regarding the instability in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere.
Over the past year, the team has been successfully establishing a new testing site in Golden, Colorado intending to enable CU students to perform LiDAR experimentation and analysis. The testing facility is equipped with all the technology necessary to complete these projects, and the undergraduate students are modeling and implementing supplemental devices to best optimize and practicalize the reliability, range, and repeatability of the resulting data obtained from the telescopes. With the implementation of the Fe Doppler-free spectroscopy method, the students will be able to record and analyze the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere at Wallops Island for local aerospace and atmospheric science applications with NASA.