Above the islands of Hawaii oOn January 28, a green laser was seen piercing the night sky, silently tracing a path toward the horizon like a stutter in Matrix code.
The scene was captured through a telescope on Hawaii’s highest peak.
You can view the scanning laser in the footage below.
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Luckily, this wasn’t an alien spacecraft scanning the earth for signs of life. It appears that the mysterious green rays actually came from an orbiting satellite. But not the ones we expected.
Originally, experts from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), which co-owns the camera, announced on Twitter that the green light probably came from a radar device on an orbiting satellite, known as ICESat-2.
ICESat-2 is owned by NASAand it is used to keep track of the thickness of Earth’s sea ice, ice sheets, and forests.
But on Feb. 6, 2022, NAOJ updated its footage of the laser beam and said the trajectory made it unlikely it was NASA after all.
“According to Dr. Martino, Anthony J., a NASA scientist working on ICESat-2 ATLAS, it’s not because of their instrument, it’s because of others,” explains a note in the YouTube video.
“His colleagues, Dr. Alvaro Ivanoff et al., performed a satellite trajectory simulation with a similar instrument and found a most likely candidate to be the ACDL instrument of the Chinese Daqi-1/AEMS satellite.
“We really appreciate their efforts in identifying the light. We apologize for our confusion related to this event and its potential impact on the ICESat 2 team.”
China’s Daqi-1 satellite was started in April last year and similar to ICESat-2, it is an atmospheric environment monitoring satellite.
That means it’s in orbit around the Earth to monitor global carbon levels as well as air pollution.
Daqi-1 contains five instruments to help him with this, including ACDL, which stands for Aerosol and Carbondioxide Detection Lidar.
Lidar is an acronym for Laser Imaging, Detection and Ranging and works a bit like sonar. But instead of emitting sound waves to map an area, it emits laser beams.
And it’s those lasers that are believed to have lit up the skies over Hawaii in late January.
In the case of ACDL, it can broadcast Dual wavelength lasers at specific wavelengths to detect different molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The time it takes for these laser beams to bounce back provides information about the composition of the atmosphere and the soil below.
For example, ACDL can calculate how much CO2 is in the Earth’s atmosphere by emitting two alternating lasers around it 1572 nanometer wavelength range.
“Daqi-1 can monitor particulate matter pollution such as PM2.5, pollutant gases such as nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and ozone, and carbon dioxide concentration,” a press release from March 2021 by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which developed Daqi-1.
Daqi-1 is still in its infancy, so we’re still waiting for the results of its scans.
But if all goes according to plan, the satellite is just the beginning of China’s plans to keep tabs on air pollution.
“China will produce a series of Daqi satellites in the future, which will be used to monitor air pollution, provide remote sensing data to environmental agencies, and support scientific research on global climate change,” explained in the March 2021 press release.
“Daqi-1 will be linked with other satellites including Daqi-2 to realize greenhouse gas monitoring and help China reduce carbon emissions.”
It remains to be seen if these green atmospheric detection lasers will become more common as China achieves that goal.
