"Next month, NASA will launch into space the most advanced laser instrument of its kind, beginning a mission to measure - in unprecedented detail - changes in the heights of Earth's polar ice.
NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) will measure the average annual elevation change of land ice covering Greenland and Antarctica to within the width of a pencil, capturing 60,000 measurements every second.
"The new observational technologies of ICESat-2 - a top recommendation of the scientific community in NASA's first Earth science decadal survey - will advance our knowledge of how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contribute to sea level rise," said Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Science Division in NASA's Science Mission Directorate."
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