WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

At NASA's Building 836, the Spacecraft Labs Telemetry Station at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a United Launch Alliance Delta II booster has been removed from its shipping container. Preliminary checkouts and preflight processing will begin leading to launch of the agency's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex-2 at Vandenberg is scheduled for Sept. 12, 2018, and will be the last for the venerable Delta II rocket. Once in orbit, the satellite is designed to measure the height of a changing Earth, one laser pulse at a time, 10,000 laser pulses a second. The satellite will carry a single instrument, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System. ICESat-2 will help scientists investigate why, and how much, Earth's frozen and icy areas are changing. These areas make up the Earth's cryosphere.