observatory moves in the along-track direction, the aggregation of overlapping footprints form a
ground track on the Earth’s surface.
Approximately 10
14
photons begin the journey from ATLAS, travelling through the atmosphere
to reflect off the Earth’s surface, return through the atmosphere and back into the ATLAS
telescope.
For highly reflective surfaces and clear skies, on the order of ten signal photons from a single
strong beam are expected to be recorded by ATLAS for a given transmit laser pulse. At the same
time, background photons from sunlight at the same 532-nm wavelength may be arriving at the
detector, and some of them will also be recorded by ATLAS. Any photon that ATLAS records
an arrival time for is called a photon event, regardless of the source of the photon. The number of
photon events recorded by ATLAS depends on the geometry and reflectance of the Earth’s
surface, solar conditions, and on scattering and attenuation in the atmosphere. The number of
returned photon events varies from near zero photon events per shot over very dark non-
reflective surfaces, up to twelve photon events per shot over very reflective surfaces.
In order to reduce the volume of data downlinked to Earth, ICESat-2 uses on-board flight
software to identify and downlink data from those photon events most likely to represent
returned photons from the laser pulse while also providing data on the atmospheric conditions.
Given the 10-kHz laser pulse repetition rate, there are many transmitted laser pulses en route to
and from Earth at any point in time. Transmitted laser pulses are separated in flight by ~30
kilometers in one-way travel. As such, there is an inherent height ambiguity of ~15 kilometers in
received photon events. Consequently, ICESat-2 can only characterize the lowest ~15 kilometers
of the Earth’s atmosphere. The on-board software counts photon events and generates a
histogram spanning the lowest ~14 kilometers of the atmosphere with 30-m vertical bins. These
atmospheric histograms aggregate the number of photon events over four hundred consecutive
laser transmit pulses (an atmospheric histogram is generated every 0.04 seconds, spanning 280
meters of along-track distance). Atmospheric histograms are downlinked for the three strong
ATLAS beams.
The volume and rate of photon events is large enough that ATLAS cannot assign unique time
tags to every received photon event and downlink the relevant information. Instead, the flight
software sets a range window of at least 500 meters and not more than 6,000 meters within
which detected photons are time tagged and become photon events. The width of the window
primarily depends on the surface type (e.g. ocean, land ice, land) as well as the topography
(Leigh et al., 2014). Within the range window, ATLAS attaches time tags for received photons
and generates altimetric histograms of these events. The on-board software uses these histograms
to identify the surface and specify which photon event data are downlinked to Earth for each
beam. The band of photon time tags downlinked to Earth is called the telemetry band. The width
of the telemetry band of each beam is potentially different, and is described fully in the ATLAS
Science Receiver Algorithm Description document.
The ATL02 ATBD contains a description of how photon times of flight are calculated. The
pointing vector and observatory position in space are described by the ATBDs for Precision
Pointing Determination (PPD), and Precision Orbit Determination (POD), respectively.