NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2, ICESat-2, carries the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, ATLAS, which sends 10,000 laser pulses per second towards Earth and records individual photons reflected back to its telescope. The volume of data produced by the instrument, nearly a TB of data every day, presents a challenges for the user wishing to explore and do quick analysis on the data. Although NSIDC, the data center responsible for archiving and distributing ICESat-2 data, provides services such as browse and spatial, temporal and parameter subsetting on the data, these are not necessarily conducive to exploratory work. OpenAltimetry, a collaborative project between NSIDC and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has created an online platform that allows users to quickly view photon clouds, or waveform energy profiles in the case of ICESat/GLAS, the predecessor mission to ICESat-2/ATLAS, for any time and location of interest to the user, as well as the surface-specific elevations from the higher level ATLAS products. OpenAltimetry emphasizes ease-of-use and rapid response times. NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2, ICESat-2, carries the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, ATLAS, which sends 10,000 laser pulses per second towards Earth and records individual photons reflected back to its telescope. The volume of data produced by the instrument, nearly a TB of data every day, presents a challenges for the user wishing to explore and do quick analysis on the data. Although NSIDC, the data center responsible for archiving and distributing ICESat-2 data, provides services such as browse and spatial, temporal and parameter subsetting on the data, these are not necessarily conducive to exploratory work. OpenAltimetry, a collaborative project between NSIDC, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego, has created an online platform that allows users to quickly view photon clouds, or waveform energy profiles in the case of ICESat/GLAS, the predecessor mission to ICESat-2/ATLAS, for any time and location of interest to the user, as well as the surface-specific elevations from the higher level ATLAS products. OpenAltimetry emphasizes ease-of-use and rapid response times. A user can do more in depth data analysis on a Jupyter notebook invoked through OpenAltimetry’s map-based interface, thus providing a full data analysis stack that lives in the cloud and enables scientists to do their work without investing a lot of time thinking about dependencies and deployments.