Summary

The plane containing the lidar finally took off. It was a twin-engine aricraft called a Skymaster with a push-pull configuration with two engines mounted in line. The plane was marked by patches of peeling paint, and the lidar box sat in the inside of the plane. The expensive lidar machinery was being hauled around by what Preston calls "a shabby flying tin can" (88). The pilot, Chuck Gross, was a large, tranquil man from Georgia.

The technology of lidar developed after the discovery of radar. Like radar, lidar involves bounding a laser beam off something and measuring the round-trip time of the reflection to measure the distance. It has been used as a mapping tool and carried on Apollo 15 and 17 to map the moon's surface. It was also carried on the Mars Global Surveyor to create a topographic map of Mars's surface. The...