While the Biden administration was ineptly dealing with the Chinese spy balloon floating across the country, a camera located on a Hawaiian peak captured a series of green laser beams darting across the sky that appear to have originated from a Chinese satellite.
Lasting a matter of seconds, just as it turned 2:00 a.m. local time (7:00 a.m. ET), footage from the camera caught the bands arcing left to right, footage shows. While the owners of the camera initially supposed it was a NASA mapping satellite, the U.S. space organization has said that it was not them, suggesting it may have been the Chinese.The camera—looking out from Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano—is attached to the Subaru Telescope, and is a joint venture between the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).On January 29, it posted the footage on YouTube, suggesting that the beams could have come from a remote-sensing laser altimeter from NASA’s ICESat-2/43613 satellite, launched in September 2018 as part of its Earth Observing System with the goal of measuring and monitoring the impacts of climate change. According to NASA, it is able to emit 10,000 pulses a second.
The ICESat-2, which is owned by NASA and used to keep an eye on the thickness of Earth’s sea ice, ice sheets, and forests, was originally thought to be the source of the lights. However, it took several days to determine that the laser beams likely came from a Chinese unit, which reportedly monitors the atmosphere.
…[O]n 6 February 2022, NAOJ updated their footage of the laser beam saying that based on the trajectory, it was unlikely to be NASA after all.”According to Dr. Martino, Anthony J., a NASA scientist working on ICESat-2 ATLAS, it is not by their instrument but by others,” a note on the YouTube video explains.”His colleagues, Dr. Alvaro Ivanoff et al., did a simulation of the trajectory of satellites that have a similar instrument and found a most likely candidate as the ACDL instrument by the Chinese Daqi-1/AEMS satellite.”We really appreciate their efforts in the identification of the light. We are sorry about our confusion related to this event and its potential impact on the ICESat-2 team.”
China’s Daqi-1 satellite was launched in April 2022 and is reportedly an atmospheric environment monitoring satellite.
Daqi-1 can monitor fine particle pollution like PM2.5, pollutant gases, including nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and ozone, and carbon dioxide concentration. China aims to produce a series of Daqi satellites to provide remote sensing data support for environmental authorities and scientific research on global climate change.A China Long March 4C rocket launched the Daqi-1 mission on April 15, 2022, according to Rocket Launch. It is equipped with five remote sensing instruments, including atmospheric detection lidar, a high-precision polarization scanner, a multi-angle polarization imager, an ultraviolet hyperspectral atmospheric composition detector and wide-field imaging spectrometer to improve global carbon monitoring and atmospheric pollution monitoring.Here are the five instruments.
- ACDL (Aerosol and Carbon dioxide Detection Lidar)
- DPC-II (Directional Polarimetric Camera)
- EMI-II (Environmental Trace Gas Monitoring Instrument)
- POSP (Particulate Observing Scanning Polarization)
- WSI (Wide Spectral Imager)
A new report indicates that China has more than double the fossil fuel CO2 emissions of the U.S. and will remain the world’s largest carbon polluter for some time.
Given the global angst about this trace gas and American trepidation about China’s activities in our nation’s skies, perhaps China should confine its atmospheric studies over China for the time being.
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