On September 16, 2022, a homemade motion-detecting electronic camera established by Daichi Fujii near Mount Fuji, Japan, recorded green laser light from NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite. It’s the very first time the ICESat-2 group has actually seen video footage of the lidar instrument at work. The satellite has 6 beams; the left-most beam in the image is Beam 4, the more powerful beam beside it is Beam 3. The 2 much shorter and fainter green streaks in the image are the beams spreading off greater clouds, and the dot that appears beside those faint streaks is the ICESat-2 satellite. Courtesy of Daichi Fujii/Hiratsuka City Museum
The green light spotting throughout the cloudy sky was something that Daichi Fujii had actually never ever seen prior to. The museum manager’s motion-detecting cams were established near Japan’s Mount Fuji to record meteors, permitting him to compute their position, brightness, and orbit. But the intense green lines that appeared on a video taken September 16, 2022, were a secret.
Then Fujii looked more detailed. The beams were integrated with a small green dot that was quickly noticeable in between the clouds. He thought it was a satellite, so he examined orbital information and got a match.
