EARTH DYNAMICS GEODETIC EXPLORER
Piecing Together Earth’s Climate Story...
EDGE monitors shifting ecosystems and melting ice to help us understand and manage Earth’s natural resources and address environmental challenges.
Laser altimetry is the only technique with sufficient canopy penetration and vertical accuracy to map the 3D structure of terrestrial ecosystems and surface topography of ice.
EDGE provides actionable data on terrestrial ecosystems and cryosphere change to inform national priorities for natural resource management and for sea level and climate projections.
EDGE is designed to meet objectives for two Decadal Survey Targeted Observables: Terrestrial Ecosystem Structure & Ice Elevation.
EDGE is based on high heritage across GSFC and several key industrial partners, and implemented on the Maxar 500 spacecraft bus providing agile and precise pointing control and accurate pointing knowledge.
EDGE’s swath-mapping laser altimeter delivers unprecedented coverage with high accuracy to measure critical regions undergoing rapid change.
Goal: Understand how the 3D structure of terrestrial ecosystems and the surface topography of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice are changing.
Science Team: EDGE’s interdisciplinary team has been carefully selected to achieve a diversity of membership as well as coordination and integration of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. The team includes members from different types of US and international institutions, academia, agencies and industry.
EDGE fills current gaps in sampling and coverage: Instrument design, mission orbit, and agile and precise spacecraft pointing control enable measurements at the spatial and temporal scales necessary to monitor and understand the processes driving change.
Next Generation: Solid-state scanning splits each of 5 lasers into an 8-beam mini-swath, representing a novel advance from multi-beam profiling (GEDI & ICESat-2) to swath-mapping with geodetic waveform-recording laser altimetry
High Heritage: Fibertek’s high-efficiency, single-stage lasers in combination with General Dynamics’ 1.2 m Be telescope and GEDI scanning technology leverage heritage to maximize sensitivity, coverage, and resampling to track dynamics
Transformative: Order of magnitude improvement in our ability to directly observe key Earth System changes in 3D at the spatial and temporal scales of driving processes
