The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) Summary Mission Timeline and Performance Relative to Pre-Launch Mission Success Criteria

• Main Authors: Abdalati, Waleed, Zwally H. Jay, Webb, Charles E.
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Earth Resources and Remote Sensing; Antarctic; Greenland; Antarc*; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20130014062

The Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) mission was conceived, primarily, to quantify the spatial and temporal variations in the topography of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. It carried on board the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS), which measured the round-trip travel time of a laser pulse emitted from the satellite to the surface of the Earth and back. Each range derived from these measurements was combined with precise, concurrent orbit and pointing information to determine the location of the laser spot centroid on the Earth. By developing a time series of precise topographic maps for each ice sheet, changes in their surface elevations can be used to infer their mass balances.