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My name is Brian Blair, I'm an instrument scientist and I'm the
principle investigator for the LVIS sensor. What's really interesting about
being an instrument scientist is, it's not a really a precisely defined field.
So essentially you're trying to translate scientific requirements
into engineering requirements. So it's a pretty broad field, there's a lot of room
for creativity, it's very exciting. So LVIS is a high
altitude, airborne laser mapping sensor. The acronym
stands for the Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS). It's designed to operate at
high altitudes so we can map a much larger area very quickly. Because it can
map such a large area, we can look at landscape scale processes.
So we may not look at an individual patch of vegetation
or a small feature of a glacier. We would map
the entire glacier system. So in 2009,
we flew to the Antarctic Peninsula, and as we were mapping with LVIS we were
taking high-resolution camera imagery at the same time. So we
took all those images, mosaic them together and merge them with the LVIS data.
Now we have a product that you can actually interact with,
and see all the different views; you can go walk around places that you could never
physically walk around because they're too dangerous. So when we developed that,
it was with the intention of giving scientists the ability
to interact with the topography data in a way that they never could, just looking
at it flatly on a computer screen. Maybe they pick out a different
way to approach a problem, or you know, it would inspire them to do something different
with the data. So where we're getting to now, we flew the LVIS sensor
that was developed for this high altitude drone, the Global Hawk. That can fly at 60
thousand feet for up to 30 hours. So we used to fly for 3 hours
in some aircraft now the Global Hawk is 30 hours. We used to have a
few hundred meter swath, now we have a 4 kilometer wide swath. But the other
advantage of flying high is that you burn less fuel, you can fly
faster and you can fly a much larger area. Most scientists
believe that you can only get small amount of area mapped.
As you bring in LVIS and especially Global Hawk LVIS, all of a sudden you bust through that
limitation, you're mapping huge amounts of areas. And what could
have taken 10 or 20 years with some of the older
sensors, now could literally be done in a single season. You
could almost map the entire Greenland ice sheet in a single season.
So everything that we do with LVIS whether it's science application
development or algorithms or technology prototyping, leads us to planetary
mapping. We want to map the earth because we want to map everything and we want to do it
often. But we could also apply this technology to other planets as well.
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