Delta II ICESat-2 Fairing Cleaning and Sampling

On Friday, April 6, 2018, in NASA’s Building 8337 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, technicians and engineers check samples during cleaning of the payload fairing that will protect NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, satellite during launch. Liftoff atop a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket is scheduled for Sept. 12, 2018, from Space Launch Complex-2 at Vandenberg. It will be the last for the venerable Delta II rocket. ICESat-2, which is being built and tested by Orbital ATK in Gilbert, Arizona, will carry a single instrument called the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, or ATLAS. The ATLAS instrument is being built and tested at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland. Once in orbit, the satellite is designed to measure the height of a changing Earth, one laser pulse at a time, 10,000 laser pulses a second. ICESat-2 will help scientists investigate why, and how much, Earth’s frozen and icy areas, called the cryosphere, are changing.