The green light streaking across the cloudy sky was something that Daichi Fujii had never seen before.
The green light streaking across the cloudy sky was something that Daichi Fujii had never seen before. The museum curator's motion-detecting cameras were set up near Japan’s Mount Fuji to capture meteors, allowing him to calculate their position, brightness, and orbit. But the bright green lines that appeared on a video taken Sept. 16, 2022, were a mystery.
Then Fujii looked closer. The beams were synchronized with a tiny green dot that was briefly visible between the clouds. He guessed it was a satellite, so he investigated orbital data and got a match. NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite 2, or ICESat-2, had flown overhead that night. Fujii posted his findings on social media, which eventually got the attention of the NASA team.
It’s the first time the ICESat-2 team has seen footage of the satellite’s green laser beams streaming from orbit to Earth, said Tony Martino, ICESat-2 instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“ICESat-2 appeared to be almost directly overhead of him, with the beam hitting the low clouds at an angle,” Martino said. “To see the laser, you have to be in the exact right place, at the right time, and you have to have the right conditions.”
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