ICESat's Sole Instrument Shipped to Colorado

ICESat's sole instrument, the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS), was shipped to Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado for integration with the spacecraft. The instrument left Goddard in a tractor-trailer in the early hours of June 14. This is the first operational mission that will use lasers that were both designed and built in-house by Goddard. The Laser Remote Sensing Branch, Code 924, built GLAS. GLAS is the first laser-ranging instrument for continuous global observations of Earth, which will make unique observations as an important component of the Earth Science Enterprise climate change program.

ICESat is the benchmark EOS mission to achieve Earth Science Enterprise requirements for measuring ice sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, vegetations and land topography. ICESat will collect data to correlate the rise or fall of the world's sea level to the respective loss or accumulation of the ice volume covering Antarctica and Greenland. ICESat is scheduled to launch this December aboard a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

For more information on the ICESat project, visit: http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/