MABEL is a remote sensing system developed jointly by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Sigma Space. MABEL was created by a team of scientists and engineers to help determine whether previous NASA research regarding the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, could be replicated from space utilizing new-generation laser altimetry.
To prove this possible, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt MD recently flew an ER-2 aircraft over the California desert to measure surface elevations over a series of targets across the US SW. The plane, with MABEL tucked firmly inside its nose, flew 12 miles above the earth’s surface where outside temperatures were a bone chilling -56C and air pressure was only 5 per cent of that of the earth’s surface. Hexagon’s SPAN GNSS/INS technology is incorporated into MABEL to orientate the LiDAR data, allowing geo-referencing of the measurements.
The mission was a complete success. The data collected from this flight proved that measurement techniques planned for NASA’s Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission, scheduled for launch in January 2016, will definitely work at high altitudes. The IECSat-2 mission will be critical to furthering research regarding changes in land and sea ice, vegetation and cloud characteristics, and to analysing the impact these changes have on regional and global climates.