ICESat
ICESat, or Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite, is a NASA mission designed to measure changes in the Earth's ice sheets, land elevations, vegetation canopies, and cloud heights from space. The program has included two successive missions: ICESat and ICESat-2, each using laser altimetry to determine surface elevations with high precision.
The original ICESat was launched in 2003 and carried the GLAS (Geoscience Laser Altimeter System) instrument.
ICESat-2 was launched in 2018 to extend and improve the capabilities of its predecessor. It uses ATLAS,
Together, ICESat and ICESat-2 advance understanding of how polar and terrestrial surfaces respond to a warming