"Canadian Made", a series on the Canadian History Channel, recently aired a segment titled "Space Gizmos" that included the Phoenix Mars Lander lidar designed by Optech. Dr. Allan Carswell, Optech’s founder, was featured and some of the filming was done at Optech. The Phoenix lidar gathered the data that discovered the existence of snowfall on Mars. It was an amazing achievement for Optech, the whole Phoenix team and Dr. Carswell as well – he started in this field when lidars had just been invented, and now his lidar technology is on another planet.
For more information, see http://www.history.ca/. The Phoenix Mars Lander home page is at http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/index.php