ICESat-2 Orbit
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- Visualizations by:
- Greg Shirah
- View full credits
ICESat-2 is a spacecraft designed to accurately measure land and ice elevations on Earth. By comparing observations from different times, scientists will be able to study changes in elevations. ICESat-2 will be in a polar orbit which will provide high coverage near the poles where ice elevations are changing relatively quickly. This visualization shows ICESat-2's polar orbit from afar, then closer up. As we get close to the satellite, the 3 pairs of ICESat-2's ATLAS lidar laser beams begin to resolve. A ground track shows ICESat-2's global coverage which repeats about once every 90 days.
The ATLAS lidar on ICESat-2 uses 3 pairs of laser beams to measure the earth’s elevation and elevation change. As a global mission, ICESat-2 will collect data over the entire globe, however the ATLAS instrument is optimized to measure land ice and sea ice elevation in the polar regions.
For more information on ICESat-2 click here.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Visualizer
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Thorsten Markus (NASA/GSFC)
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Producer
- Ryan Fitzgibbons (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
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Technical support
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
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Data provider
- Timothy Rebold (Emergent Space Technologies LLC)
Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
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Terra and Aqua BMNG (Blue Marble: Next Generation)
ID: 508Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).
This dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
See all pages that use this dataset -
Hipparcos Tycho Catalogue (Tycho 2 Catalogue)
ID: 550This dataset can be found at: http://archive.eso.org/ASTROM/
See all pages that use this dataset -
GEOS Atmospheric Model
ID: 665 -
ICESat-2 STK Ephemeris
ID: 984
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.