Image Caption: In 2010, Icelands Eyjafjallajkull volcano erupted, creating an expansive ash cloud that disrupted air traffic throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. CATS may improve the ability to measure volcanic particles and other aerosols from space. Credit: NASA

Lori Keesey, NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center

The Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS), a new instrument that will measure the character and worldwide distribution of the tiny particles that make up haze, dust, air pollutants and smoke, will do more than gather data once its deployed on the International Space Station this year.

CATS is a groundbreaking science and technology pathfinder, said Colleen Hartman, deputy center director for science at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Not only will it make critical measurements that will tell us more about the global impact of pollution, smoke and dust on Earths climate, it will demonstrate promising new technology and prove that inexpensive missions can make critical measurements needed by the modelers to predict future climate changes.

A Technological First

Technologically, NASA has never before flown an instrument like CATS.

Developed by a Goddard team led by scientist Matt McGill, the refrigerator-size CATS will demonstrate for the first time three-wavelength laser technology for measuring volcanic particles and other aerosols from space. It is intended to operate for at least six months and up to three years aboard the Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility, augmenting measurements gathered by NASAs CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations) mission.

However, the big difference between the two is that CALIPSO uses two wavelengths the 1,064- and 532-nanometer wavelengths to study the same phenomena.

Thats not the only difference, McGill said. CATS, which was developed with NASA and Goddard research and development funding, also carries extremely sensitive detectors that can count individual photons, delivering better resolution and finer-scale details. It also will fire 5,000 laser pulses per second, using only one millijoule of energy per second. In sharp contrast, CALIPSO delivers 20 laser pulses per second, using a whopping 110 millijoules of energy in each of those pulses.

As a pathfinder mission, what were trying to determine is whether the addition of the third wavelength 355 nanometers, which is in the ultraviolet will produce the results we expect it to generate, McGill said. We believe it will deliver more detailed information revealing whether the particles scientists see in the atmosphere are dust, smoke or pollution. Though it adds an advanced capability, particularly when coupled with the new detectors, engineers believe the ultraviolet wavelength may be particularly susceptible to damage caused by contamination, McGill said.

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New Remote-Sensing Instrument To Blaze A Trail On The International Space Station