We were waiting for it, that green light… NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite has been measuring Earth’s height with lasers since 2018, but it took four years for the perfect conditions to actually capture its elusive green beams on camera. Daichi Fujii, a museum curator in Japan, uses motion-detecting cameras to capture meteors over Mount Fuji. On September 16, 2022, those cameras captured footage of ICESat-2’s green laser beams. https://go.nasa.gov/409Vn8J ICESat-2 was launched in September 2018 with a

Measurements & data from our NASA ICE ICESat-2 🛰️ helped to create the first satellite-based maps of snow depth across Arctic sea ice. Initial results suggest that the ice has thinned by as much as 20% in the last decade: https://go.nasa.gov/360peWv | NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Better together 🤝 NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite and GEDI instrument on the International Space Station work together to give us the most complete view yet of Earth’s forests! 🌲🌳🌴 They each map forests in 3D, measuring the total mass of all living trees in an area. These measurements help scientists understand how much carbon is stored within Earth’s forests. Why do they work together? The ISS doesn’t orbit over the poles, which means that GEDI can’t collect data there. That’s where ICESat-2 come