Friday, February 10, 2023

The "wall" of green lasers seen in Hawaii in January was reportedly a scanning laser from a Chinese satellite

Vice:
Last month, a camera from a telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i's tallest mountain, captured something eerie: a wall of green lasers visibly shooting across the sky.
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"According to ... a NASA scientist working on ICESat-2 ATLAS, it is not by their instrument but by others," the update stated. "His colleagues ... 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.
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Daqi-1 was launched last year and serves a similar purpose to ICESat-2, being designed to monitor atmospheric pollution using lasers.