NASA will intensify its focus on one of the most critical but remote parts of our changing planet with the launch of two new satellite missions and an array of airborne campaigns. The space agency is launching these missions at a time when decades of observations from the ground, air and space have revealed signs of change in Earth's ice sheets, sea ice, glaciers, snow cover and permafrost. Collectively, scientists call these frozen regions of our planet the "cryosphere." Ongoing changes with the cryosphere, while often occurring in remote regions, have impacts on people all around the world: sea level rise affects coastlines globally, more than a billion people rely on water from snowpack, and the diminishing sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean plays a significant role in Earth's climate and weather patterns.
Currently NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences are scheduled to launch the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, twin satellites that will continue the original GRACE mission’s legacy of tracking fluctuations in Earth's gravity field in order to detect changes in mass, including the mass of ice sheets and aquifers. Then in the fall, NASA will launch the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), which will use a highly advanced laser instrument to measure the changing elevation of ice around the world, providing a view of the height of Earth's ice with greater detail than previously possible. Together the two missions will make critical, complementary measurements of Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets. Both missions will also make other key observations: for instance, GRACE-FO will measure groundwater reserves and deep ocean currents; ICESat-2 will measure sea ice thickness and vegetation height.
Credits:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-renews-focus-on-earths-frozen-regions
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