Citation about the project (from the project website)
Studying the climate on Mars has been a topic for scientific curiosity for a long time. As on Earth, the composition of the Martian atmosphere is a key factor for understanding the climate, which is of vital importance to enable future human exploration of the red planet. Lidar instruments are used on Earth to characterize the vertical distribution of dust and clouds in the atmosphere. These Earth based instruments are too heavy and require too much power consumption to be used in space missions. The investigation of atmospheres on other planets requires technological developments that allow the lidar instruments to have a greatly reduce mass and power consumption. MiLi proposes to raise the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of three basic technologies to enable the construction of a lighter and less power consuming miniaturized LIDAR for Mars atmospheric research.