Photon Phriday: One Phull Orbit

Follow an entire orbit of the ICESat-2 mission as it measures the elevation of oceans, sea ice, mountains, and islands around the Earth. This video shows the same orbit (ground reference track 1352) on two different dates (Dec. 26, 2018, and Sept. 24, 2019) to capture the clearest, least-cloudy data examples. Each frame shows a different aspect of the orbit. The upper left frame is the entire photon cloud standardized on a global scale. The upper right frame shows selected photon cloud granules that sync with the global scale within a degree in order to show more spatial detail. In many cases, the zoomed-in photon clouds in this frame have been slowed down in order to show details clearly. The bottom right frame shows video examples of the terrain that correspond with where the orbit is. The bottom left terrain is the continuous orbit on a blue marble with labels for countries and other geographic features that represent where the orbit went over or very nearby.

https://nasa.gov/icesat2

Music: "Sun Age," "Data Visions," "Water Memory," via Universal Production Music

Video credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Lead Producer:
Ryan Fitzgibbons (USRA)

Lead Visualizer:
Kel Elkins (USRA)

Lead Scientists:
Thomas A. Neumann (NASA/GSFC)
Nathan T. Kurtz (NASA/GSFC)
Kaitlin Harbeck (SGT)

Lead Project Support:
Kaitlin Harbeck (SGT)

Lead Editor:
Ryan Fitzgibbons (USRA)

Animator:
Adriana Manrique Gutierrez (USRA)

This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio at: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13735

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