2003 EARTH SCIENCE VIDEOTAPES |
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Tape Title | Record ID | Date Produced | TRT: |
Synopsis |
| ICESAT SHINES A LIGHT ON OUR WORLD | G03-041 | 12/09/03 | 00:11:35 | NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) is sending home spectacular 3-D views of Earth's clouds, polar ice sheets, mountains, forestlands and even fires, all to help scientists understand how our changing climate will affect life on Earth. The focus objective of the ICESat mission and its Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) instrument is to measure the surface elevations of the large ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland and how they are changing, The mission also addresses critical issues for the atmosphere and biosphere by detecting cloud and aerosol heights in the atmosphere, dust storms, pollution smoke from forest fires and even tree heights.
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TAPE CONTENTS: |
| ITEM (1): A Global Perspective
- Criss-crossing the world below at nearly 17,000 miles per hour, ICESat is covering the Earth from space with unprecedented accuracy and detail. GLAS sends short pulses of green and infrared light though the sky 40 times a second, all over the globe, and collects the reflected laser light in a one-meter telescope. Although the signature goal of ICESat's mission is to observe ice near the poles, the satellite makes measurements continuously around the entire globe, providing important information about our planet's clouds, oceans, mountains, forests, and fields.
Courtesy: NASA
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| ITEM (2): A New Look: Antarctica in Three Dimensions - ICESat's orbit was designed to maximize coverage over the great polar ice sheets, where ground tracks overlap to create an intricate grid of data points. The accumulation of these data points in the Southern Hemisphere results in a new three-dimensional elevation model of Antarctica in better detail than ever before. For the first time, scientists will be able to tell from space exactly whether amounts of ice and snow in the middle of ice sheets are rising or falling from previous years as the Earth's climate undergoes natural and human-induced changes.
Courtesy: NASA
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| ITEM (3): Three Antarctic Transects from ICESat - ICESat's first topographic profiles across the continent reveal the textured surfaces of Antarctic ice sheets in unprecedented detail. The following animations show three different transects of the Antarctic continent as seen by ICESat.
1. Antarctica from coast to coast: the transect begins near Wrigley Gulf, crosses the Ross Ice Shelf and central Antarctica, and tapers off at the Amery Ice Shelf. The high flat area in the center of the continent is called the East Antarctic plateau.
2. From sea ice to ice streams: the transect starts over sea ice in the Amundsen Sea and travels inward, ending over the West Antarctic Ice Streams where we get a closer look at this dynamic portion of the polar landscape.
3. A closer view of the coast: a close-up transect that passes near the Banzare Coast in Antarctica, showing the remarkable detail in data from ICESat's GLAS instrument.
Courtesy: NASA
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| ITEM (4): A Continuous View of Clouds - ICESat is providing scientists with the most accurate measurements of the heights of clouds and critical observations of atmospheric particles called aerosol. The measurements help climate modelers, who reconstruct the past and project future climate. The influence of aerosol particles generated by human activity is considered the largest uncertainty for current global warming studies. ICESat directly sees, for the first time from space, the height of all clouds and also aerosol layers from sources like dust storms and forest fires. This animation shows the distribution of cloud layers as seen from the bird's-eye perspective of the ICESat spacecraft.
Courtesy: NASA
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| ITEM (5): Clouds Reflect Solar Energy - Cloud heights and the concentrations of aerosol particles are important to scientists in determining the amount of solar energy reflected and absorbed into the lower or upper atmosphere. The white clouds and light colored aerosols reflect energy back to space, while dark aerosols absorb energy and warm the air. Clouds also trap heat radiation that would be lost to space. If clouds are higher, more heat radiation is trapped. All of these factors add into an equation to determine whether or not the lower atmosphere is warming or cooling around the world.
Courtesy: NASA
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| ITEM (6): GLAS Sheds New Light Around the World - ICESat's single scientific instrument is called GLAS, for Geoscience Laser Altimeter System. It is the first instrument to map our planet using lasers from a dedicated satellite platform. Using one of its three onboard lasers, GLAS precisely measures the time it takes for a pulse of light to travel from the laser to a reflecting object, in this case the Earth's surface and any intervening clouds, and return to detectors on the satellite. In addition, other parts of GLAS help determine precisely where GLAS is, relative to our world below.
Courtesy: NASA
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| ITEM (7): ICESat Joins the Earth-Observing System - ICESat was launched January 12, 2003 and is the latest in a series of Earth Observing System spacecraft designed to study the environment of our home planet and how it may be changing. This system, a part of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, is dedicated to understanding the Earth as an integrated system and applying Earth System Science to improve prediction of climate, weather and natural hazards using the unique vantage point of space.
Courtesy: NASA
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| ITEM (8): B-Roll - Video footage of ice and clouds.
Courtesy: NASA
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