NASA is preparing to launch a cutting-edge, laser-armed satellite that will spend three years studying Earth's changing ice sheets from above.

Called the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), the mission is currently scheduled to launch in mid-September. The satellite will be able to measure the changing thickness of individual patches of ice from season to season, registering increases and decreases as small as a fifth of an inch (half a centimeter).

"The areas that we're talking about are vast — think the size of the continental U.S. or larger — and the changes that are occurring over them can be very small," Tom Wagner, a NASA scientist studying the world's ice, said during a news conference on Aug 22. "They benefit from an instrument that can make repeat measurements in a very precise way over a large area, and that's why satellites are an ideal way to study them."

While the mission is optimized for studying ice at the poles, its data should also aid scientists studying forests around the planet.

ICESat-2, which cost a little over $1 billion and is about the size of a Smart car, will follow two previous major NASA projects to monitor ice thickness.

In 2003, the original ICESat began seven years of laser-aided measurements of ice height, bouncing a single laser off the surface of the ice. Because ICESat-2 wasn't ready to launch when the original mission ended, NASA designed a stopgap airplane-based mission called Operation IceBridge to track particularly crucial areas of ice.

Source: Live Science

BDST: 1453 HRS, AUG, 26, 2018
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