NASA's space laser has an impact on climate change

NASA's mission to measure the impact of climate change and other factors on the melting polar ice caps has started well. ICESat-2 will use lasers to determine how precarious the situation is. ICESat-2 – or the satellite for elevating ice, clouds and land – will pick up where its predecessor had left it, with a much higher degree of accuracy.

Unlike other recent launches from NASA, which have seen several instruments take their orbit, ICESat-2 has only one instrument. The Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) uses a visible green laser light that emits pulses at a wavelength of 532 nm. This unique laser will be divided into six beams, organized in three pairs and will shoot at 10,000 times per second.

As they reach the surface of the Earth, each pair will be separated by a distance of just over two miles. As ICESat-2 moves into orbit, it will take a measurement of the height at each point, just about every 28 inches. With this, he will be able to estimate the altitude at each point, allowing researchers to determine height differences between sea ice and polar oceans.

"With this mission, we continue to explore the remote polar regions of our planet and better understand how current changes in land ice cover at the poles and elsewhere will affect lives around the world, now and in the future," he said. Thomas Zurbuchen. Associate Administrator of the NASA Science Missions Directorate, said about the launch.

The results will be a database of the annual changing height of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, to 4 millimeters. It will also provide new, more accurate predictions of sea-level rise, and scientists hope that they will help to understand what causes a decrease in floating ice and its impact on the ocean and the atmosphere. .

"ICESat-2 will conduct a state-of-the-art scientific data collection; the precision measurements it's going to make from space are going to be incredible, "said NASA's launch director Tim Dunn about satellite deployment. The original ICESat mission took place from 2003 to 2009, before NASA replaced it with Operation IceBridge flights. This took annual measurements of ice flow changes.

In contrast, ICESat-2 will perform 1,387 unique ground tracks around the Earth, a process that will take 91 days. Then, he repeats this again, recording several reputations of measurements to better record the changing ice conditions. In total, four passages a year are expected.

The first ICESat fired its laser 40 times per second, away from the 10,000 times of this second-generation ATLAS instrument. Indeed, says NASA, "if ICESat-2 flew over a football field, it would take 130 measurements between the end zones; his predecessor, on the other hand, would have taken a step in each end zone.

The results will be shared publicly and will undoubtedly be examined by researchers looking for new evidence of the impact of climate change on the planet. Earlier, NASA researchers have revealed that the drift of the Earth's spin axis – the oscillation of the planet during its rotation – would be due at least partially to the melting of the ice sheets of Greenland.