Results of the pre-development of Aladin, the direct detection doppler wind lidar for ADM/AEOLUS

The Atmospheric Dynamics Mission (ADM-Aeolus) has been selected as ESA's second Earth Explorer Core Missions within its Living Planet Programme [1]. Its payload aims at providing measurements of atmospheric wind profiles with global coverage. The key element of ADM-Aeolus is the Atmospheric LAser Doppler Lidar INstrument (ALADIN), a Direct Detection Doppler Lidar in the ultra-violet spectral region operating on aerosol and molecular backscatter signals in parallel. The ALADIN instrument belongs to a completely new class of earth-observation payloads with limited power requirements and high reliability over a three-year lifetime. It will be the first European Lidar in space. Technological challenges are addressed in an early stage by a pre-development programme that consists of designing, manufacturing and testing a functional representative model of the receiver of ALADIN (the Pre-Development Model, PDM), and a breadboard of the transmitter. The pre-development programme is being established to validate the technologies used in the ALADIN design, evaluate the flight-worthiness of its major subsystems and verify the instrument overall performances. The purpose of this paper is to present the main results obtained by the ALADIN Pre-Development Model. Results on the transmitter development are summarised in another paper of this proceeding [2].