GEDI Overview

  • Released Monday, December 17, 2018
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The GEDI instrument was built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and has the highest resolution and densest sampling of any lidar every put in orbit. The mission is led by the University of Maryland and is designed to help researchers understand how ecosystems are storing carbon.

Complete transcript available.

Music: Secret Science, by Lee Groves [PRS], Peter George Marett [PRS]; Team Effort, by Alexandre Prodhomme [SACEM], Eddy Pradelles [SACEM]

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, or GEDI, uses advanced laser technology to reveal the makeup of remote forest ecosystems around the globe. Its measurements of the height of leaves, branches, trees, and shrubs below its path will help scientists map the structure of forests and better understand how ecosystems are storing or releasing carbon.

GEDI's lidar instrument sends laser pulses down to Earth, where they penetrate the globe’s temperate and tropical forests. The laser beams ricochet off the first thing they hit, which can be a leaf atop a dense canopy, a protruding branch, or the ground from which the forest emerges. The energy returned to the GEDI telescope on the International Space Station will provide and intricate three-dimensional map of forest canopies.



"We can send out a little pulse of light and it travels down, reflects off the surface, and comes back," Bryan Blair, GEDI instrument scientist and deputy principal investigator, said. "We can see and measure how tall the tree is and we can actually see how dense it is as we go down."

Version without music and chyrons.

The GEDI instrument was built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and has the highest resolution and densest sampling of any lidar every put in orbit. The mission is led by the University of Maryland and is designed to help researchers understand how ecosystems are storing carbon.

Complete transcript available.

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This page was originally published on Monday, December 17, 2018.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:46 PM EDT.

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