No, The Matrix Did Not Glitch Over The Sky Of Hawai’i

The peculiar green light show was created by a NASA research satellite.

January 28 saw a peculiar event taking place above the sky of Hawai’i. Green lights were seen coming down from the heavens. The bizarre effect, reminiscent of the computer-inspired title screen of The Matrix, was not proof that we live in a simulation. It was a NASA satellite taking observations.

The culprit is ICESat-2. The acronym stands for Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2, which isn't the best as acronyms go. But the science that it does is pretty awesome. It can shoot 10,000 laser pulses a second, with about 20 trillion photons leaving the spacecraft. About a dozen come back, but those are enough to measure the elevation of ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice in exquisite detail.

But ICESat-2 can also measure the heights of forests, lakes, urban areas, and cloud cover. And it was this part of the mission that was the focus of the lasers spotted over Maunakea. The ICESat-2 emits a laser at 532 nanometers – that's the blue-end of the green portion of visible light.

The image and videos were snapped by the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera on the Subaru telescope located on Maunakea. The presence of telescopes on the summit and the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope is more than controversial. Pollution from the current observatories, failures in decommissioning, mismanagement of the site, and legal problems are some of the many issues that Native Hawaiians have raised time and time again against this development.

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