A Real-Time Lidar Status-Monitoring Website and Local Control Program for a Mobile Tropospheric Ozone Research Vehicle

Abstract:

The Rocket-city O₃ Quality Evaluation in the Troposphere (RO₃QET) is an ozone lidar developed by the University of Alabama in Huntsville and NASA. It is a transition from a ground-based system to a vehicle-based mobile system. To ensure that the RO₃QET can be fully mobile in conducting research, it is important to be able to monitor and control its equipment remotely.

The purpose of this project was to create an expandable framework for autonomous lidar data acquisition, starting with the core part of the lidar system, the Quantel ICE-450 laser transmitters. A web-based GUI was developed to monitor feedback from the three laser transmitters using Python, HTML, PHP, CSS, and JavaScript. Additionally, a Python script was created to allow an operator to remotely start up and shut down the laser system. Both the status-monitoring and control systems were found to be useful in expanding the mobility and remote capabilities of the RO₃QET.