First Long-Duration Lidar Satellite Mission CALIPSO Ends

CALIPSO, a lidar satellite that advanced the world’s understanding of climate, weather, and air quality, ended its scientific mission on Aug. 1, 2023. CALIPSO Researchers used the space-based CALIPSO lidar to measure the planet’s largest animal migration, which takes place when small sea creatures swim up from the depths at night to feed on phytoplankton, then back down again just before sunrise. Credits: NASA/Timothy Marvel Across 17 years of operation, the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation recorded more than 10 billion lidar measurements and informed thousands of scientific reports. CALIPSO was launched jointly by NASA and the France's Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales/CNES and in tandem with the cloud-profiling radar system on the CloudSat satellite. More

(Source: NASA - Sep 27)