In February 2010, NASA satellite ICESat-1 (Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite) was decommissioned. Designed as a three-year mission, it successfully met its goal of returning science data for five years. Its replacement, ICESat-2, is expected to launch in 2015. To bridge the missing satellite data gap, NASA launched its Operation Ice Bridge airborne campaign to survey the most sensitive and critical areas of sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers in the Arctic and the Antarctic.
Now, in its second year of operations, IceBridge returns to the Antarctic to re-survey areas that are undergoing rapid change and search for new lines of investigation. From Oct. 20 through Nov. 20, 2010, NASA has scheduled 22 potential flights to collect land-ice data over the Thwaites, Pine Island and Abbot glaciers, and collect sea-ice data over Weddell, Bellinghausen and Amundsen Seas. The flights will last approximately 11 hours.
“The polar ice caps are a key bellwether of climate change. It is critical that we maintain a continuous observational record of this important region to document changes over time”, said Kent Shiffer, project manager with the Earth Science Project Office (ESPO) at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
ICESat was launched in January 2003, and was the first mission of its kind –specifically designed to study Earth's polar regions with a space-based laser altimeter called the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System, referred to as GLAS. After seven years in orbit and 15 laser-operations campaigns, ICESat science mission recently was concluded.
ICESat-1 collected data for ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice. It determined changes in the ice sheets’ elevation and measured the thickness of sea ice. ICESat data have shown dramatic thinning of the ice, up to 10 meters per year in places. Areas surveyed included coastal Greenland and its outlet glaciers, coastal Antarctica, including the Antarctic Peninsula and ice shelves, the sea ice of the Arctic and Antarctic and the southeast Alaskan glaciers.
Fuente: Physorg
