An artist's illustration of NASA's ICESat-2.Credit: NASA
Nature reports NASA is set to launch the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) from Vandenberg Air Force Base into a 500 km orbit on September 15th.
It will focus on measuring changes in ice thickness in places including Greenland and Antarctica, but it will also collect data on forest growth and cloud height.
ICES can track changes in sea ice thickness of just 5 millimeters
ICESat-2’s predecessor, ICESat, ended its mission in 2009. It took five years to develop the technology for ICESat-2’s Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS), which measures elevation by firing and timing the return oc 10,000 laser pulses every second. It can take measurements every 70 centimeters, a vast improvement on the 170 meteter data interval of its predecessor
ATLAS can also track alterations in forest growth and combine these data with information from other Earth-monitoring satellites to gain a more complete view of the global processes that are affecting ice, the oceans and climate.
“And that’s what we really need,” says Peter Neff, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Because if we don’t understand the processes that are driving change, we’re not really able to say much about what may continue to happen in the coming decades.”
“There’s no question that climate change is playing a significant role in this, but there are other factors," says Abdalati. "And as scientists, we’re trying to understand them all.”
