The exact role of the phytoplankton in global climate change is currently not well understood. Learning more about this relationship is very important in developing a better understanding regarding the nature of the carbon-cycle and global climate; not from just a purely scientific view, but one that could impact the well-being of man and other living things on Earth.

The NASA Airborne Oceanographic Lidar (AOL) Fluorosensor is a laser spectrofluorometer which is operated from a NOAA Twin Otter, a NASA P-3B or NASA C-130 aircraft. By observing the Laser Stimulated Fluorosence (LSF) and the passive ocean color from our aircraft we can get an idea of how much phytoplankton there is. These aircraft measurements greatly assist calibrating satellite ocean color sensors which can help estimate how much raw material they are taking up on a global scale and thus measure the Primary Productivity of the Earth's oceans and seas.

The system consists of a rack-mounted 166MHz Pentium PC with 32MB of RAM, 4GB of disk storage, a National Instruments AT-GPIB/TNT ISA GPIB interface card, two Lecroy 9354 500 megasample/second digital Oscilloscopes, a Garmin 195 GPS receiver, and a Heineman Infrared Radiometer, and of course the system laser, optics, spectrometer, Fiber-optic faceplate, and Hammamatsu photo-multiplier Modules.

The operating system, on which all this runs, is — of course — Linux. The NASA engineers used have written a detailed technical paper on the project, which includes block diagrams and functional descriptions of both the hardware and the software.

Read NASA Paper

 
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