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If all goes well for NASA on Saturday, climate scientists will get a new eye in the sky that will be able to watch the Earth’s ice melt practically drip by drip .

O.K., not that precisely. But the new satellite, called ICESat-2, will give researchers the sharpest look ever at melting glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice, which make up much of the Earth’s frozen regions that are collectively known as the cryosphere. All that melting ice contributes to sea level rise, and ICESat (an imperfect acronym for Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite) will provide important information about how quickly it’s happening.

NASA is scheduled to launch the satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 5:46 a.m. Pacific time, or 8:46 a.m. Eastern. The agency will show the launch live on NASA.com.

Since this is ICESat-2, you know there was an earlier ICESat: It launched in 2003 and operated until 2009. Since then, NASA has been taking measurements from airplanes flying over Greenland and Antarctica, a stopgap program known as Operation IceBridge that has cost about $15 million a year.