Caption: Mike Krainak (left) and Diego Janches recently won NASA follow-on funding to advance a spaceborne sodium lidar needed to probe Earth’s poorly understood mesosphere.
<p>Credits: NASA/W. Hrybyk
</p><p>More:
A team of NASA scientists and engineers now believes it can leverage recent advances in a greenhouse-detecting instrument to build the world’s first space-based sodium lidar to study Earth’s poorly understood mesosphere.
</p><p>Scientist Diego Janches and laser experts Mike Krainak and Tony Yu, all of whom work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are leading a research-and-development effort to further advance the sodium lidar, which the group plans to deploy on the International Space Station if it succeeds in proving its flightworthiness. Read more: &lt;a href="<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://go.nasa.gov/2rcGpSM">https://go.nasa.gov/2rcGpSM</a>" rel="nofollow"&gt;go.nasa.gov/2rcGpSM&lt;/a&gt;
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<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/34570239521/">NASA Aims to Create First-Ever Space-Based Sodium Lidar to Study Poorly Understood Mesosphere</a>