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ICESat mission ends successfully
last update: Sep 01, 2010 03:00 PM
From an "MSNBC" article: The NASA satellite ICESAT, ended its successful mission earlier this week after spending seven years studying Earth's Polar Regions.
It burned up in the atmosphere on its way back to earth and some debris from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation satellite (ICESat), fell into the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia at approximately 5 a.m. EDT Monday. This information came from the Orbital Debris Program Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA officials said that the craft's lasting legacy will be its impact on the understanding of ice sheet and sea ice dynamics as the ICESat mission has led to scientific advances in measuring changes in the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, polar sea ice thickness, vegetation-canopy heights, and the heights of clouds and aerosols.
Jay Zwally, ICESat's project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said "ICESat has been a tremendous scientific success. It has provided detailed information on how the Earth's polar ice masses are changing with climate warming, as needed for government policy decisions."
"Thanks to ICESat we now also know that the Antarctic ice sheet is not losing as much ice as some other studies have shown," Zwally said.
Read more:
MSNBC.com, 31st August 2010
