On 26 and 27 October 2023, a meeting between ASI and NASA took place at the ASI headquarters in Rome to verify and define the collaboration activities on the CALIGOLA project following the letters of mutual interest for a collaboration.
NASA has tasked the Langley Research Center - NASA with leading and coordinating contributions for the CALIGOLA mission.
LaRC has significant expertise in LIDAR science, systems and detectors and is able to provide significant contributions to the CALIGOLA mission.
The meeting was attended by, other than ASI and NASA, by UNIBAS, which is carrying out scientific activity, for the Agency, to support the mission, and by Leonardo Spa, which is engaged in a phase-A study for the development of the LIDAR instrument for the CALIGOLA mission.
CALIGOLA (Cloud Aerosol LIDAR for Global Scale Observations of the Ocean-Land Atmosphere System) is an extremely ambitious mission, the main instrument is represented by a Raman LIDAR with a primary focus on the study of the atmosphere, but also a consolidated interest in the study of the Ocean-Earth-Atmosphere system and the mutual interactions within it.
The intent is to develop a state-of-the-art Raman LIDAR at 3-wavelengths (354.7nm, 532nm and 1064nm) emitted by an Nd:YAG source and exploits all the possible elastic and inelastic echoes from atmospheric /surface /ocean produced with these 3-wavelengths.
During the meeting, each Agency presented the status of the activities, the respective scientific objectives and priorities, the mission concepts developed and the possible contributions of each agency, the roles and responsibilities of the key figures involved in the activity and finally, the schedule of the activity has been analyzed in detail.
The interaction was very effective on all aspects: scientific, programmatic and technical of the mission with an exceptional effort profuse by the two teams during the meeting to establish, with passion and enthusiasm, another pillar in the partnership between ASI and NASA on Earth Observation.
