A green laser beam across the sky over Japan caught the attention of Daiichi Fuji, an astronomer who was watching the museum’s cameras erected atop Mount Fuji to record comets in space. However, he soon realized that this phenomenon was abnormal.
At the time of the recording, which took place on September 16, 2022, Fuji saw that the beams were out of sync with a small green dot and quickly imagined them to be from a satellite.
After that, his next goal was to find out what the satellite was. He used the map data and found it to be NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Earth Satellite 2, or ICESat-2.
“ICESat-2 appears to be moving almost straight on, as the beam hits low-lying clouds at an angle,” said Tony Martino, ICESat-2 instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“To see a laser, you have to be in exactly the right place, at the right time, and in the right conditions,” the researcher added.
The laser came from the satellite
The laser’s job is to calculate ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica, among other observations related to the poles. The device does this by firing 10,000 times per second, sending six beams of light toward Earth. It accurately doubles the time it takes for individual photons to bounce off the surface and back to the satellite.
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According to the researcher, laser recording is very difficult. The satellite must have been photographed several times as it passed through Chile and the United States, but seeing its laser fire is extremely rare, as the cameras and eyes need the laser light to reflect off something to see the beam from the side.
Fortunately, the night Fuji was at the observatory, there were enough clouds for the reflection to occur.
ICESat-2 was launched in September 2018 with the goal of using laser light to measure the height of ice, water, and Earth’s surfaces from space.
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