Launching Laser Into Space: NASA’s this September strategy to track Earth’s Melting Ice

Ever imagined a Third Dimensional Earth image of the glaciers and melting ice caps and the essential details of how it’s affecting our climate and the places around. Well NASA is making this crazy idea possible for us. NASA will launch ICESat -2, a cutting edge,laser armed satellite on September 15 to track the Earth’s melting ice. ICESat-2 will measure elevation to see how much glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets are rising and falling leading to insights into how these changes impact people where they live. Called the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2),the satellite will be able to measure the changing thickness of individual patches of ice from season to season,registering increases and decreases. While the mission is optimized for studying ice at the poles, its data should also aid scientists studying forests around the planet. ICESat-2, which cost a little over $1 billion and is about the size of a Smart car,will follow two precious major NASA projects to monitor ice thickness. So far for those lasers have brought disturbing news. “What ICESat found is that the sea ice is actually thinning” Wagner said. “We’ve probably lost over two-thirds of the ice that used to be there in the 80s.” There’s only one scientific instrument on ICESat-2, but it is a marvel. The Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System or ATLAS laser fires 10,000 pulses a second with a trillion photons in each shot. Hundreds of people at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, worked to build this astonishing instrument. The spacecraft can measure the height of two types of ice. Land ice, like the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, or glaciers of the Himalaya, builds up as snow falls over centuries and forms compacted layers. When it melts, it can flow into the ocean and raise sea level. Sea ice, on the other hand, forms when ocean water freezes. It can last for years, or a single winter. When sea ice disappears, there is no effect on sea level (think of a melting ice cube in your drink), but it can change climate and weather patterns far beyond the poles. The new spacecraft will produce much more detailed data than the original mission and more constant data than the Ice Bridge. With ICESat-2’s data, scientists can add the Third Dimensional Earth– height — to those portraits of Earth. Here’s how the new mission works: ICESat-2 will orbit about 300 miles above Earth’s surface carrying an ATLAS laser that will constantly emit a laser beam of bright green light, which will split into 6 different beams as it leaves the satellite. The beams will then bounce off the surface of the ice in a grid pattern. Most of the photons in the laser beams will be lost, but a handful will make their way back to the satellite. The arrangement of the beams into 3 pairs helps cover more ground and show how steep glaciers are. ATLAS essentially acts like a stopwatch and can note how that round trip took down to the nearest billionth of a second.Scientists then can convert that time into a distance, calculating the height of the surface at that location. ICESat-2’s launch will be the last voyage of United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket, which has seen more than 150 launches over its nearly 30-year career.
“In the half a second that it takes a person to blink, ICESat-2 will collect 5,000 elevation measurements in each of its six beams,” Neumann said.
“That’s every minute of every hour of every day for the next three years.” ICESat-2’s fast-firing laser, combined with the instrument’s timing precision, sensitive photon-detection technology and other features will allow the ICESat-2 mission to produce remarkable results and make the study more compact and clear for the research and development of our planet Earth.