AN OVERVIEW OF LITE - NASA LIDAR IN-SPACE TECHNOLOGY EXPERIMENT

The Lidar In-space Technology Experiment (LITE) is a three-wavelength backscatter lidar developed by NASA Langley Reearch Center to fly on t he Space Shuttle. LITE flew on Discovery in September 1994 as part of the STS-64 mission. The goals of the LITE mission were to validate key lidar technologies for spaceborne applications, to explore the applic ations of space lidar, and to gain operational experience which will b enefit the development of future systems on free-flying satellite plat forms. The performance of the LITE instrument was excellent, resulting in the collection of over 40 GBytes of data. These data present la wi th our first highly detailed global view of the vertical structure of cloud and aerosol from the Earth's surface through the middle stratosp here. This paper will discuss the LITE instrument, the LITE mission an d briefly present some results from the experiment. These preliminary results highlight the benefits to be obtained from long duration satel lite lidars.