At first they thought it was NASA, but it wasn’t.
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00:00This video of the skies over Hawaii was captured at the end of January this year.
00:08Blink and you'll miss it, but those are the mysterious green lasers that were blasting across the night sky.
00:13It was initially reported that the lasers were coming from a NASA satellite, but a NASA spokesperson says it wasn't theirs.
00:19So what the heck was doing it? Well, fortunately, it was a satellite.
00:23The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan just misattributed the event to the wrong one.
00:27Apparently, based on the trajectory of the lasers, it was likely a Chinese Daqi-1 AEMS satellite.
00:33That one was only just launched in April of last year, now orbiting the Earth as an atmospheric environmental monitoring satellite.
00:39It's specifically looking at our planet's carbon levels and how much pollution is in the air.
00:44It does so by doing what was recorded here, firing out dual-wavelength lasers meant to bounce off particles
00:49and produce metrics on what kind and how many of those molecules are present in any particular area.