The Airborne Laser Ranging System - Its capabilities and applications

The Airborne Laser Ranging System is a proposed multibeam short pulse laser ranging system on board an aircraft. It simultaneously measures the distances between the aircraft and six laser retroreflectors (targets) deployed on the earth's surface. Depending on the host aircraft and terrain characteristics, the system can interrogate hundreds of targets distributed over an area as large as 60,000 sq. km in a matter of hours. Potentially, a total of 1.3 million individual range measurements can be made in a 6 hr flight. The precision of these range measurements is approximately 1 cm. These measurements are then used in a procedure which is basically an extension of trilateration techniques to derive the intersite vector between the laser ground targets. By repeating the estimation of the intersite vector, strain and strain rate errors can be estimated. These quantities are essential for crustal dynamic studies which include determination and monitoring of regional strain in the vicinity of active fault zones, land subsidence, and edifice building preceding volcanic eruptions.