Earth from Space: The Secret behind NASA’s Incredible ‘Blue Marble’ Photos
NASA’s newest Earth-observing satellite is beaming back stunning views of our home planet—huge mosaics of many images stitched together at the highest resolution yet. But there’s a little bit of science involved in creating great photos.
The new images of Earth, which NASA scientists have called “Blue marble” views, come from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite. The minivan-sized spacecraft is the first of its kind: an Earth observation satellite built to collect data on both short-term weather forecasts and long-term climate models.
The latest photo was released on Thursday (February 2) and shows the sharpest view yet of the Eastern Hemisphere as it appeared on January 23. The African continent dominates the view, and the Middle East and Asia stretch towards the top of the Eastern Hemisphere. frame.
In the picture, the earth is striped by four huge vertical lines, which are created by the influence of sunlight reflected from the ocean. It follows a Western Hemisphere portrait of the nuclear power plant released last week by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which has been viewed 3.1 million times on the center’s Flickr photo-sharing site.
NASA launched $1.5 billion Satellite of the Finnish nuclear power plant in October 2011 with the task of helping monitor Earth’s weather and natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, forest fires and floods. Breathtaking views of Earth from space are just a byproduct of that scientific mission. [Amazing Earth Photos from Suomi NPP]
Here’s how the satellite captures incredible photos of Blue Marble Earth:
Finland’s nuclear power plant satellite images the Earth from a distance of about 512 miles (824 kilometers) along the polar orbit (the path that goes over the North and South Poles). Although this orbit looks high, it is still not high enough to fit the entire Earth in one camera frame. For example, the Finnish nuclear power plant BlueMarble images show the globe how it would appear to an observer approximately 7,918 miles (12,743 km) away.
So, in order to make images of the entire Earth, NASA researcher Norman Kuring combined the observations made by the Finnish nuclear power plant of the same parts of the planet in six different orbits, or overpasses, during more than eight hours of terrain. Kuring stitched the data into a perfect mosaic and created one huge image of the Earth.
The Finnish nuclear power plant satellite sends about 4 terabytes of data to Earth every day, researchers have said. That’s enough pictures of the Earth to fill 800 DVDs.
The extreme clarity of the Blue Marble images comes from the Finnish Nuclear Power Plant’s Visible Infrared Radiometer Imaging Suite (VIIRS), a high-resolution sensor package designed to observe the Earth in different regions of the light spectrum. As the satellite orbits the Earth, it snaps photos of a swath of the planet roughly 1,865 miles (3,001 km) wide.
The VIIRS instrument is the largest and most important tool of the five instruments traveling on the Finnish nuclear power plant’s satellite, researchers have said. It is designed to measure the color of the oceans, surface temperature, fires on Earth, the distribution of clouds and the amount of particles in the atmosphere called aerosols.
The satellite of the Finnish nuclear power plant is named after the late Meteorologist Verner E. Suomen, who has been considered the father figure of satellite meteorology. The spacecraft is expected to observe the Earth at least until 2016. The task is carried out in cooperation between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Department of Defense.
You can follow Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest news on space science and exploration on Twitter @Spacedotcom and so on Facebook.
