Greenland Campaign Takes Flight for Better Ice Sheet Measurements

A NASA instrument nestled in the belly of a small plane flew over Greenland’s ice sheet and the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters. Flying above creviced glaciers, chunks of ice floating in melt ponds, and the slushy edges of the ice sheets, the instrument used a rapidly firing laser to measure the elevation of the surface below.

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The ICESat-2 mission flew a laser altimeter instrument aboard an aircraft over Greenland in August 2015, to determine how green laser light interacts with different types of snow and ice. (The peculiar appearance of the plane's propeller is an artifact of the way the digital camera records pixels, not all at once when an image is taken.) Credits: NASA/Mike Wusk
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