While felines in space may be what youre thinking, the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) is a much more helpful accompaniment planned for theInternational Space Station. CATS will study the distribution of aerosols, the tiny particles that make up haze, dust, air pollutants, and smoke.

When IcelandsEyjafjallajkull volcanoerupted nearly four years ago, for example, officials grounded flights in Europe because particles contained within its massive plume could damage aircraft engines, resulting in potentially deadly consequences for passengers. NASA couldnt dispatch aircraft-borne instruments for the very same reasons European officials had grounded commercial aircraft. When the next volcano erupts, NASA will have a new tool in orbit that can monitor the spread of particles in Earths atmosphere from its space-based perch.

ThisEarth remote sensinginstrument is scheduled to launch to the space station in September 2014 as a demonstration project. Its sensors will help researchers determine for the first time what state-of-the-art, three-wavelength laser technology can do from space to measure tiny airborne particlesalso known as aerosolsin Earths atmosphere.

Developed by NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Matt McGill, and his team, CATS will be able to see the character as well as vertical and horizontal distribution of aerosols in a whole new light. When CATS begins operations from its docking port on the Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility (JEM-EF), the refrigerator-sized sensor will continue measuring atmospheric aerosols using the same two-laser wavelengths as NASAs Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) mission the 1064 and 532 nanometer wavelengths.

Third Wavelength Added

What makes CATS stand out is the addition of a third laser wavelength at 355 nanometers. This will deliver more detailed information and could help scientists differentiate between the types of particles in the atmosphere. CATS is also equipped with extremely sensitive detectors capable of counting individual photons, delivering better resolution and finer-scale details.

"You get better data quality because you make fewer assumptions, and you get, presumably, a more accurate determination of what kind of particles youre seeing in the atmosphere," said McGill.

While CALIPSO can deliver 20 pulses of laser per second, using, as McGill described it, a whopping 110 milliJoules of energy in each of those pulses, CATS will fire 5,000 laser pulses per second, with only about 1 milliJoule for each pulse. The greatly simplified CATS power and thermal requirements are a huge plus for space-borne applications.

Earth Science from the Space Station

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Testing CATS in Space: Laser Technology to Debut on Space Station