Overall Mission Orbits — overall_mission

This function allows the user to view information of the nominal mission orbits and beam locations: "The processed files have 7 tracks per orbit: one for each of the six beams of ICESat-2, and the seventh for the Reference Ground Track (RGT). The RGT is an imaginary line through the six-beam pattern that is handy for getting a sense of where the orbits fall on Earth, and which the mission uses to point the observatory. However, the six tracks for the six beams are our best estimate of where the beams will actually fall on Earth's surface."

overall_mission_orbits(
  orbit_area,
  download_method = "curl",
  threads = 1,
  verbose = FALSE
)

Arguments

orbit_area: a character string specifying the nominal mission orbits and beam locations. It can be one of 'antarctic', 'arctic', 'western_hemisphere' or 'eastern_hemisphere'
download_method: a character string specifying the download method. Corresponds to the 'method' parameter of the 'utils::download.file()' function. Can be one of 'internal', 'wininet' (Windows only), 'libcurl', 'wget', 'curl' or 'auto'
threads: an integer that specifies the number of threads to use in parallel when processing the data
verbose: a boolean. If TRUE then information will be printed out in the console

Value

an 'sf' object of multiple tracks (see the 'LAYER' column of the output object)

References

https://icesat-2.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/specs

Examples


if (FALSE) {

require(IceSat2R)

res_orb  = overall_mission_orbits(orbit_area = 'antarctic',
                                  download_method = 'curl',
                                  threads = 1,
                                  verbose = TRUE)
str(res_orb)
}