NASA ICESat-2 Satellite's Elusive Green Lasers Spotted at Workhttps://phys.org/news/2023-04-nasa-satellite-elusive-green-lasers.html... 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 was launched in September 2018 with a mission to use laser light to measure the height of Earth's ice, water, and land surfaces from space. The laser instrument, called a lidar, fires 10,000 times a second, sending six beams of light to Earth. It precisely times how long it takes individual photons to bounce off the surface and return to the satellite. Computer programs use these measurements to calculate ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica, observe how much of the polar oceans are frozen, determine the heights of freshwater reservoirs, map shallow coastal regions, and more.
... With the precise location of the satellite in space, the location of where the beam hit, the coordinates of where Fujii's cameras were set up, and the addition of cloudy conditions, Martino was able to confirm, definitively, that the streaks of light came from ICESat-2's laser.