A fully portable LIDAR system has been designed for use with the Auger fluorescence detectors (FDs). The primary purpose of the roving LIDAR is to provide the FDs with artificial tracks that are generated by atmospheric scattering of a 355 nm laser beam.The laser is mounted on a steering mechanism,giving all sky coverage and an absolute accuracy of better than 0.1deg.The energy in the beam can be adjusted between 5 mJ and 200 fi3.The absolute beam energy is monitored to an accuracy of better than 10%.At full energy the laser beam produces a track that has brightness greater than the fluorescence track of a 10~(20) eV cosmic ray.The laser tracks have a wide range of uses for developing our understanding of the behavior of the FDs.These include absolute FD calibration,track reconstruction accuracy,FD timing,multi-mirror event reconstruction,FD trigger efficiency and FD aperture determination.The roving LIDAR is also used for atmospheric monitoring.A receiving mirror and photomultiplier tube (PMT) are mounted on the steering mechanism to measure the backscatter signal from the laser track. In this paper we will describe the roving LIDAR system and present results from tests of this system.
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