NASA Satellite to Measure Earth’s Melting Ice’

• NASA is set to launch a satellite equipped with the most advanced laser instrument of its kind in to space, to provide critical observations of how the Earth’s ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice are changing.
• Scheduled to launch on September 15, the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) will measure the average annual elevation change of land ice covering Greenland and Antarctica, capturing 60,000 measurements every second.
• “The new observational technologies of ICESat-2 — a top recommendation of the scientific community in NASA’s first Earth science decadal survey — will advance our knowledge of how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contribute to sea level rise,” said Michael Freilich, from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in the US.
• Its Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) measures height by timing how long it takes individual light photons to travel from the spacecraft to Earth and back.4

Business Line 21.09.18