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(Music)

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My name is Brian Blair, I'm an instrument scientist and I'm the 

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principle investigator for the LVIS sensor. What's really interesting about 

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being an instrument scientist is, it's not a really a precisely defined field.

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So essentially you're trying to translate scientific requirements

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into engineering requirements. So it's a pretty broad field, there's a lot of room 

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for creativity, it's very exciting. So LVIS is a high

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altitude, airborne laser mapping sensor. The acronym 

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stands for the Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS). It's designed to operate at 

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high altitudes so we can map a much larger area very quickly. Because it can

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map such a large area, we can look at landscape scale processes.

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So we may not look at an individual patch of vegetation

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or a small feature of a glacier. We would map 

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the entire glacier system. So in 2009,

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we flew to the Antarctic Peninsula, and as we were mapping with LVIS we were 

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taking high-resolution camera imagery at the same time. So we

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took all those images, mosaic them together and merge them with the LVIS data.

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Now we have a product that you can actually interact with, 

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and see all the different views; you can go walk around places that you could never 

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physically walk around because they're too dangerous. So when we developed that, 

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it was with the intention of giving scientists the ability 

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to interact with the topography data in a way that they never could, just looking

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at it flatly on a computer screen. Maybe they pick out a different 

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way to approach a problem, or you know, it would inspire them to do something different

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with the data. So where we're getting to now, we flew the LVIS sensor 

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that was developed for this high altitude drone, the Global Hawk. That can fly at 60

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thousand feet for up to 30 hours. So we used to fly for 3 hours 

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in some aircraft now the Global Hawk is 30 hours. We used to have a

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few hundred meter swath, now we have a 4 kilometer wide swath. But the other

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advantage of flying high is that you burn less fuel, you can fly 

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faster and you can fly a much larger area. Most scientists 

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believe that you can only get small amount of area mapped.

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As you bring in LVIS and especially Global Hawk LVIS, all of a sudden you bust through that 

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limitation, you're mapping huge amounts of areas. And what could 

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have taken 10 or 20 years with some of the older

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sensors, now could literally be done in a single season. You 

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could almost map the entire Greenland ice sheet in a single season.

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So everything that we do with LVIS whether it's science application 

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development or algorithms or technology prototyping, leads us to planetary 

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mapping. We want to map the earth because we want to map everything and we want to do it 

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often. But we could also apply this technology to other planets as well.

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(music)

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(beeping)

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(beeping)