Surface Topography and Vegetation (STV)Airborne Campaign

Airborne Surface, Cryosphere, Ecosystem, and Nearshore Topography

Surface Topography and Vegetation (STV) plans to conduct several airborne campaigns for contemporaneous radar, lidar, and stereoimaging data collection. The focus will include different types of targets to provide surrogate data for space-based performance modeling and science.

Campaign Planning

Map of the United States with Hawaii, the West Coast, and East Coast covered in highlighted in blocks with circles scattered through those regions.

Initial STV airborne planning for East Coast, West Coast and Pacific/Hawaii (July 2024)

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Instruments

Potential instruments for airborne campaigns include:

UAVSAR

The Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) attaches to the fuselage of an Gulfstream aircraft to collect a roughly 12-mile-wide (19-kilometer-wide) image of an area.
https://uavsar.jpl.nasa.gov

QUAKES-I

The Quantifying Uncertainty and Kinematics of Earth Systems Imager (QUAKES-I) is an airborne optical stereo-imaging system that enables rapid, large-scale production of high-resolution topographic data.
https://airbornescience.jpl.nasa.gov/instruments/quakes-1

LVIS

The Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) is an airborne, wide-swath imaging laser altimeter system that is flown over target areas to collect data on surface topography and 3-d structure. LVIS typically operates at an altitude of 10 km above the ground producing a data swath of 2km wide with 7-10 m footprints.
https://lvis.gsfc.nasa.gov/Home/index.html

CASALS

Concurrent Artificially intelligent Spectrometry and Adaptive Lidar System
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20230015620