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The ICESat-2 science team had

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a group meeting, of course, virtually
in this weird era that we're in.

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And to make the meeting a little bit
more interesting, our science team

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lead Lori Magruder, she sort of challenged
all the participants to find

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what's most interesting thing
that you've seen inside ICESat-2 data.

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But I happened to find an example
of where ICESat-2

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flew over a hangar in Germany.

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It's a very large building.

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It's one of the largest buildings in the
world, by volume and by footprint area.

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And that old hangar
has been turned into an indoor waterpark.

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One side of the building
is sort of polymer mylar type material.

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And the other side, that polymer or mylar
type material is clear.

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And when ICESat-2 came over
the top of the hangar,

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it actually sent a signal
through the clear polymer into the water

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park, it hit the surface of swimming pool
and returned a signal for that.

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But then it also measured the bottom of
the pool and returned a signal for that.

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So in one pass, we have the surface
of the hangar, the surface of the water

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and the surface in the bottom
of the pool. So effectively,

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ICESat-2 is sampling bathymetry
inside a building.

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Bathymetry is basically how we refer
to water column depth.

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So that measurement, you know,
you're bathymetric number is 20 meters.

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That means from the surface of the water
column down to the bedrock below

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or the land below,
there's a 20 meter differential.

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Scientists are now working
to develop those data products

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and start to map
some of our shallower water features.

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One of the luckier parts of this is
that we actually hit that hangar at night.

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So a lot of the ambient background photons
that you would receive in the

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in the detectors, all of that is minimized
because it's nighttime.

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And that allowed us to be able
to see possibly that indoor greenery,

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definitely the two layers associated
with the pool surface and the pool bottom.

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And seeing all that and tossing
that out in science team this, this

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just blew away the competition.