On January 28, a green laser was seen over the Hawaiian Islands piercing the night sky and moving silently towards the horizon like a stutter in the code of the Matrix. The scene was captured on camera from a telescope atop Hawaii’s highest peak. You can review the scanning laser in the video below.

Fortunately, it wasn’t a spaceship scanning Earth for signs of life. It turns out that the mysterious green rays actually came from an orbiting satellite. But not as we expected. Initially, experts at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), which co-owns the camera, announced on Twitter that the green light likely came from a radar instrument on the orbiting satellite known as ICESat-2.

ICESat-2 is owned by NASA and is used to monitor the thickness of sea ice, ice sheets and forests on Earth. But on February 6, 2022, the NAOJ updated its laser beam records and said it was unlikely to be NASA based on orbit.

“According to Dr. Martino, Anthony J., a NASA scientist working on the ICESat-2 ATLAS, this happened with others, not their instrument,” explains a note in the YouTube video.

“His colleagues, Dr. Alvaro Ivanoff and others, have simulated the orbits of satellites with a similar instrument and found that the most likely candidate for the ACDL instrument is the Chinese Daqi-1/AEMS satellite.

“We really appreciate the efforts to define the light. We regret our confusion about this event and its potential impact on the ICESat-2 team.”

China’s Daqi-1 satellite was launched in April last year and is a satellite used to monitor the atmospheric environment, similar to ICESat-2. This means it is in orbit around Earth to monitor global carbon levels as well as atmospheric pollution.

Daqi-1 includes five tools to help it do this, including ACDL, which stands for Aerosol and Carbon Dioxide Lidar.