NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Developed by Dr. John Degnan under the Instrument Incubator Program, the MMLA is designed to detect single photon returns reflected from targets of interest and determine their height. This instrument is comprised of an optical bench, transmit and receive optics, computer-controlled iris, spatial and spectral filters, stray-light baffles, interface optics to a micro-laser transmitter, photo detector, and CCD camera.

The Digital Mapping System (DMS) is an airborne digital camera system that acquires high resolution natural color and panchromatic imagery from low and medium altitude research aircraft. The DMS includes an Applanix Position and Orientation system to allow precision image geo-rectification. Data acquired by DMS are used by a variety of scientific programs to monitor variation in environmental conditions, assess global change, and respond to natural disasters.

Mission data are processed and archived by the Airborne Sensor Facility (ASF) located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA. DMS imagery from Operation IceBridge are archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO.

Instrument Type: Canon/Zeiss Camera with IMU/GPS
Measurements: 21-Mpixel natural color Imagery

DCS is a 16-megapixel color infrared digital camera system, providing high resolution imagery for mission tracking purposes Geo-referenced image products may be generated, when used in conjunction with a POS-AV system.

The Airborne Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (AirMISR) is an airborne instrument for obtaining multi-angle imagery similar to that of the satellite-borne Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument, which is designed to contribute to studies of the Earth's ecology and climate. AirMISR flies on the NASA ER-2 aircraft. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California built the instrument for NASA.

Unlike the spaceborne MISR instrument, which has nine cameras oriented at various angles, AirMISR utilizes a single camera in a pivoting gimbal mount. A data run by the ER-2 aircraft is divided into nine segments, each with the camera positioned to a MISR look angle. The gimbal rotates between successive segments, such that each segment acquires data over the same area on the ground as the previous segment. This process is repeated until all nine angles of the target area are collected. The swath width, which varies from 11 km in the nadir to 32 km at the most oblique angle, is governed by the camera's instantaneous field-of-view of 7 meters cross-track x 6 meters along-track in the nadir view and 21 meters x 55 meters at the most oblique angle. The along-track image length at each angle is dictated by the timing required to obtain overlap imagery at all angles, and varies from about 9 km in the nadir to 26 km at the most oblique angle. Thus, the nadir image dictates the area of overlap that is obtained from all nine angles. A complete flight run takes approximately 13 minutes.