Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on the International Space Station (ISS): Launch, Installation, Activation, and First Results

Over the past 20 years, the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and their partners developed and demonstrated the effectiveness and value of space-based lightning observations as a remote sensing tool for Earth science research and applications, and, in the process, established a robust global lightning climatology. The observations included measurements from the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and its Optical Transient Detector (OTD) predecessor that acquired global observations of total lightning (i.e., intracloud and cloud-to-ground discharges) spanning a period from May 1995 through April 2015. As an exciting follow-on to these prior missions, a space-qualified LIS built as a flight-spare for TRMM will be delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) for a 2 year or longer mission, flown as a hosted payload on the Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program-Houston 5 (STP-H5) mission. The STP-H5 payload containing LIS is scheduled launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to the ISS in November 2016, aboard the SpaceX Cargo Resupply Services-10 (SpaceX-10) mission, installed in the unpressurized "trunk" of the Dragon spacecraft. After the Dragon is berth to ISS Node 2, the payload will be removed from the trunk and robotically installed in a nadir-viewing location on the external truss of the ISS. Following installation on the ISS, the LIS Operations Team will work with the STP-H5 and ISS Operations Teams to power-on LIS and begin instrument checkout and commissioning. Following successful activation, LIS orbital operations will commence, managed from the newly established LIS Payload Operations Control Center (POCC) located at the National Space Science Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, AL. The well-established and robust processing, archival, and distribution infrastructure used for TRMM was easily adapted to the ISS mission, assuring that lightning observations from LIS on ISS can be quickly delivered to science and applications users soon after routine operations are underway. Also real-time data, available for the first time with this mission, are being provided to interested users in partnership with NASA's Short Term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) center, also located at the NSSTC.