Automating the Purple Crow Lidar

The Purple Crow LiDAR (PCL) was built to measure short and long term coupling between the lower, middle, and upper atmosphere. The initial component of my MSc. project is to automate two key elements of the PCL: the rotating liquid mercury mirror and the Zaber alignment mirror. In addition to the automation of the Zaber alignment mirror, it is also necessary to describe the mirror’s movement and positioning errors. Its properties will then be added into the alignment software. Once the alignment software has been completed, we will compare the new alignment method with the previous manual procedure. This is the first among several projects that will culminate in a fully-automated lidar. Eventually, we will be able to work remotely, thereby increasing the amount of data we collect. This paper will describe the motivation for automation, the methods we propose, preliminary results for the Zaber alignment error analysis, and future work.