On January 28, a green laser was spotted slicing the night sky above Hawaii, silently tracing a path towards the horizon like a glitch in the Matrix’s coding.
The image was captured using a telescope on the tallest mountain in Hawaii.
It appears that the odd green rays originated from a satellite in orbit.
Specialists from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), which co-owns the camera, stated on Twitter that the green light likely originated from a radar instrument on the ICESat-2 satellite.
NASA owns ICESat-2 is used to monitor the thickness of Earth’s sea ice, ice sheets, and forests.
This is accomplished by firing 10,000 laser pulses per second into the surface of our planet. This translates to 20 trillion photons exiting the spaceship, of which around a dozen are reflected back.
In this instance, it was observing cloud cover above Hawaii’s Maunakea. The satellites’ behaviour was captured by the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera on the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea.
