Gepubliceerd op 4 juni 2019
More than a trillion new measurements of Earth’s height – blanketing everything from glaciers in Greenland, to mangrove forests in Florida, to sea ice surrounding Antarctica – are now available to the public. With millions more observations added each day, data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 is providing a precise global portrait of elevation and will allow scientists to track even the slightest changes in the planet’s polar regions.
“The data from ICESat-2 are really blowing our minds, and I’m really excited to see what people with different perspectives will do with it,” said Lori Magruder, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, and the ICESat-2 science team lead.
The long-awaited ICESat-2 mission, launched in September 2018, continues the record of polar height data begun with the first ICESat satellite, which operated from 2003 to 2009. NASA’s airborne Operation IceBridge project bridged the data gap between the two satellites. The new satellite provides far more measurements than its predecessor. ICESat took approximately 2 billion measurements in its lifetime, a figure ICESat-2 surpassed within its first week.