Mysterious green rays were noticed in the sky over the USA: where did they come from

A camera attached to a Subaru telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii, recently captured

a series of strange bright green lines.They were in the night sky for just over a second, flashing one after another. It turned out that the unexpected light show was the result of lasers fired towards the Earth by a NASA spacecraft.

The image was taken by the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the Japanese news agency Asahi Shimbun.

Internet users compared frame by framean image of lasers with “digital rain,” or lines of green computer code falling vertically onto the screen in the movie “The Matrix.” In fact, the lasers were sent by a device on board NASA's ICESat-2 satellite, NAOJ representatives wrote on social networks.

An artist's interpretation of the ICESat-2 satellite that aims lasers at the Earth's surface. Image courtesy of NASA

ICESat-2 tracks changesin the cryosphere—the part of the Earth covered with solid sediments, including snow, sea, lake and river ice; icebergs, glaciers, ice sheets, ice shelves and permafrost. To do this, the satellite uses an altimeter to aim bright lasers at the Earth's surface and then measure how long it takes them to return to the satellite's dish. The ATLAS altimeter on board ICESat-2 is one of the most powerful. It fires 10,000 green laser pulses per second.

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