Satellite launching -- especially those that are observing Earth -- is not exactly news unless of course, the satellites are from private companies like SpaceX or Boeing so when NASA's observation satellite ICESat-2 was launched last September 2018, it was regarded as just another day at work. After all, there will be not much of a significant discovery on Earth since we know so much about it already, right? Wrong.
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ICESat-2 was designed to constantly measure glaciers, ice sheets, oceans, the sea ice, and tree canopies on Earth while orbiting the planet at 15,660 miles per hour. It seems nothing out of the ordinary, at first but ICESat-2 was able to look at the shallow waters of the shoreline in North America and was able to enrich data on the world's icy regions or cryosphere. What's more amazing is that ICESat-2 was able to compile a granular record of what is happening in the planet's most distant and inhospitable locations during the height of climate change. In an article written on Undark, Felix Landerer, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, scientists are trying to understand what's driving the behavior of the ice sheets and with the new data that were taken by ICESat-2, all models of ice sheets that were created can now be more precise.
This is great news, no doubt. However, ICESat-2 brought in alarming data regarding Antarctica and Greenland: the ice sheets look unsteady. This data was brought forth by the sophisticated laser called Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System or quite simply, ATLAS.
The ATLAS laser sends out trillions of photons in rapid pulses which then travel down to Earth's surface by 310 miles where it starts to scatter and bounce as soon as they hit the ice, water, canopy, mountains, soil, and sand. These photons will then be collected as they bounce back towards the satellite and at this moment lies the most crucial measurement. ICESat-2 can identify minute elevation changes by timing the photon's path from its release from the satellite to scattering at the Earth's surface, and then bouncing back to the satellite. ICESat-2 deputy project scientist Tom Neumann explained that the rate of speed that ATLAS contains is faster than a blink of an eye. "ICESat-2 is sending out a pulse from six beams, simultaneously 10,000 times a second. It takes half a second to blink an eye and in that time, ATLAS will have fired its laser 5,000 times, among six beams, and have collected 30,000 measurements already."
All the collected data will be downloaded regularly in a ground station located at Svalbard, located in the northernmost region of the Arctic. The ICESat-2 is an improved version of the ICESat which was only able to collect 40 measurements per second and according to Neumann, there is much more they can do with the satellite. However, everyone is still anticipating what may happen.
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Although long-term data about our planet does not capture the attention of a wide audience compared to, for instance, the first manned missions to Mars, but the importance of these data cannot be denied. Earth observation satellites made people understand the evolution of the planet. As of December last year, ICESat-2 has been active for 14 months and has taken about 376 billion data through the ATLAS laser and this amount of data gave way to new observations. For instance, the laser was able to peer down the crevasses within the ice sheets and measure its depth and width and at the same time able to measure summer melt ponds on Greenland and measure their depth. This technique is especially significant since Greenland underwent an extraordinary amount of melting.
The other surprising skill of the ICESat-2 is its ability to measure bathymetry or the measurement of shallow water near coastlines. This data is important for flooding projections especially when planning ahead of hurricane season.
