New space laser from NASA to track Earth’s melting ice

Thanks to NASA, the space is all set to get the most advanced laser instrument to be used to measure the alteration in height of earth’s polar ice in detail.

Via the instrument — The Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) — can be used to get the average annual elevation change of land ice in Greenland and Antarctica and will capture 60000 measurement per 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,” NASA’a Science Mission Directorate in US, Michael Freilich was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.

The instrument that is expected to be launched on September 12 can be treated as a major technological jump in measuring the height change. “ATLAS required us to develop new technologies to get the measurements needed by scientists to advance the research,” ICESat-2 project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Doug McLennan was quoted by the agency as saying. “That meant we had to engineer a satellite instrument that not only will collect incredibly precise data, but also will collect more than 250 times as many height measurements as its predecessor,” McLennan said.

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