The entire disk of the Earth lit during the equinox on September 22, 2013. Credit: Roscosmos / NTSOMZ / SRC "Planeta" / zelenyikot.livejournal.com
Here’s a fantastic view of our home planet taken by the Russian weather satellite Electro-L. And while Elektro-L can take gigantic photographs of the entire planet every 30 minutes, it only can get a fully-lit view like this just twice a year — at the spring and autumn equinoxes. This image was taken during the autumnal equinox on September 22, 2013.
Below is an animated gif of the view, going from day to night.
Animation of the Electro-L satellite’s view of Earth on September 22, 2013. Credit: Roscosmos / NTSOMZ / SRC “Planeta” / zelenyikot.livejournal.com
Elektro-L orbits Earth in a geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator, and with the Sun exactly behind the satellite on the equinox — the day the north and south poles get the same amount of light — the entire disk is fully lit.
You can see the typhoon Usagi raging over Southeast Asia, clouds and rain over Russia and swirling clouds in the ocean near Antarctica.
Electro-L was launched in 2011 and is Russia’s first geostationary weather satellite. It’s a data hog – sending back 2.56 to 16.36 megabits per second, with resolution of 1 kilometer per pixel. You can see the big 5000 x 5000 pixel version at the Electro-L website.
Thanks to Vitaliy Egorov for sharing this image with UT. He has posted the images at his zelenyikot/livejournal website.
Average temperatures in the United States. Top, what they were in the 1950s. Bottom, the predictions for the 2090s. Credit: NASA
If you’re interested to see how warm your neighborhood will look like at 2090, here’s a chance. There’s new data available that has monthly climate projections for the continental United States at the size of a neighborhood, or about a half-mile (800 meters).
Readers who have moderate to advanced knowledge of how to manipulate datasets can see instructions for how to get the raw information here. As for everyone else, NASA briefly summarized how the information could be used for community planners to deal with the effects of climate change.
The map charts how rain and temperatures in the United States will be affected based on greenhouse gases. Because, of course, this is a projection, the researchers ran four different scenarios for the period between 1950 and 2099. Climate projections came from global climate models from the upcoming Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment Report and historical surface observations.
The projections “may make it easier for resource managers to quantify anticipated climate change impacts on a wide range of conditions and resources important to local communities,” NASA stated.
The agency then provided a long list of research areas that would benefit, including “water supplies and winter snow packs, public health and the spread of insect-borne diseases, flood risk and potential impacts to critical urban infrastructure, wildfire frequency and severity, agricultural production, and wildlife and biodiversity.”
On this map of Nevada – northern California are superimposed graphics representing the average temperatures in the 1950s (top) and projected temperatures for the 2090s. Credit: NASA
As you can see from the climate map above, Nevada and California are highly affected by the projections, and officials in the region are paying attention, according to NASA.
“We are using the 800-meter downscaled datasets for conservation planning and resource management in the San Francisco Bay Area,” stated Stuart Weiss, a researcher at the Terrestrial Biodiversity Climate Change Collaborative in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“They provide an indispensable, if necessarily hazy, crystal ball into hydrological and ecological responses through the 21st century. It will be a very useful tool for climate change planning and adaptation that will be exported to the remainder of California and eventually the western United States.”
The data was crunched using supercomputers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, allowing the team to “produce the downscaled, high resolution climate dataset for the U.S. within months of release of the final global climate scenarios prepared for the next IPCC assessment report,” NASA added.
The NASA P-3B's shadow on sea ice off of southeast Greenland during an IceBridge survey on Apr. 9, 2013. Flying at a low altitude allows IceBridge researchers to gather detailed data. Credit: NASA / Jim Yungel
There’s a “Chuck Norris fact” that says Chuck once went skydiving but promised never to do it again, saying one Grand Canyon is enough. But Chuck must have taken another jump millions of years ago.
Data gathered by NASA’s Operation IceBridge, an aerial science observation mission, has uncovered a previously unknown massive canyon in Greenland, hidden under a kilometer of ice.
The canyon, found by airborne radar data, has the same characteristics of a winding river channel like the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It is at least 750 kilometers (460 miles) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon. In some places, it is as deep as 800 meters (2,600 feet), on scale with parts of the Grand Canyon. This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.
“One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped,” said Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and lead author of the study. “Our research shows there’s still a lot left to discover.”
While additional airborne radar data was used, the majority of the data was collected by IceBridge flights over Greenland during flights from 2009 to 2013. IceBridge’s Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder can see through vast layers of ice to measure its thickness and the shape of bedrock below.
In their analysis of the radar data, Bamber and his team discovered a continuous bedrock canyon that extends from almost the center of the island and ends beneath the Petermann Glacier fjord in northern Greenland.
At certain frequencies, radio waves can travel through the ice and bounce off the bedrock underneath. The amount of time the radio waves took to bounce back helped researchers determine the depth of the canyon. The longer it took, the deeper the bedrock feature.
The researchers believe the canyon plays an important role in transporting sub-glacial meltwater from the interior of Greenland to the edge of the ice sheet into the ocean. Evidence suggests that before the presence of the ice sheet, as much as 4 million years ago, water flowed in the canyon from the interior to the coast and was a major river system.
“It is quite remarkable that a channel the size of the Grand Canyon is discovered in the 21st century below the Greenland ice sheet,” said Studinger. “It shows how little we still know about the bedrock below large continental ice sheets.”
The IceBridge campaign will return to Greenland in March 2014 to continue collecting data on land and sea ice in the Arctic using a suite of instruments that includes ice-penetrating radar.
Bamber and his team had their findings published in the journal Science.
Horseshoe-shaped lateral moraines at the margin of the Penny Ice Cap on Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. Lateral moraines are accumulations of debris along the sides of a glacier formed by material falling from the valley wall. Credit: NASA / Michael Studinger
Enjoy this tour of the Arctic and Greenland, courtesy of the pilots of IceBridge, a six-year NASA mission to survey the ice at both of Earth’s poles. These views come from NASA’s P-3B aircraft, and the video is a selection of some of the best footage from the forward and nadir cameras mounted to the aircraft taken during IceBridge’s spring deployment over Greenland and the Arctic Ocean.
This airborne mission is collecting radar, laser altimetry, and other data on the changing ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice of the Arctic and Antarctic. It is the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown, and it will provide an unprecedented three-dimensional view of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice. These flights will provide a yearly, multi-instrument look at the behavior of the rapidly changing features of the Greenland and Antarctic ice.
Data collected during IceBridge will help scientists bridge the gap in polar observations between NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) — in orbit since 2003 — and ICESat-2, planned for late 2015. ICESat stopped collecting science data in 2009, making IceBridge critical for ensuring a continuous series of observations.
An aurora seen from the International Space Station on September 26, 2011. Credit: NASA.
Astronauts have tried to explain the view of Earth from space, with many saying that there just aren’t the words to describe how beautiful it is. In the latest episode of the “Science Garage,” recent ISS astronauts Tom Marshburn and Chris Hadfield might do the best job so far of relating not only the “incredible and unwrapping perspective of looking at the Earth,” but how it changed their perspective of humanity. Hadfield compares coming into the cupola of the International Space Station as being like “entering the Sistine Chapel.”
Elusive sprite lightning captured from an airplane above Boulder, Colorado as part of a sprite observing campaign. Credit and copyright: Jason Ahrns.
Mysterious red sprite lightning is intriguing: sprites occur only at high altitudes above thunderstorms, only last for a thousandth of a second and emit light in the red portion of the visible spectrum. Therefore, studying sprites has been notoriously difficult for atmospheric scientists. Astrophotographer Jason Ahrns has had the chance to be part of a sprite observing campaign, and with a special airplane from the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Research Aircraft Facility in Boulder, Colorado, has been on flights to try and observe red sprite lightning from the air.
Jason had some success on a recent flight, and was able to capture a sprite (above) on high speed film. Below you can see a movie of it at 10,000 frames per second:
Pretty amazing!
Scientists say that while sprites have likely occurred on Earth for millions of years, they were first discovered and documented only by accident in 1989 when a researcher studying stars was calibrating a camera pointed at the distant atmosphere where sprites occur.
Sprites usually appear as several clusters of red tendrils above a lighting flash followed by a breakup into smaller streaks. The brightest region of a sprite is typically seen at altitudes of 65-75 km (40-45 miles), but often as high as 90 km (55 miles) into the atmosphere.
Some of the latest research shows that only a specific type of lightning is the trigger that initiates sprites aloft.
You can read more (and see more images) about Jason’s experiences with sprites at his website.
The Moon rises surrounded by noctilucent clouds, as seen from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/ASI/ESA. Via Luca Parmitano on Twitter.
Recently, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano spent a “night flight” in the Cupola of the International Space Station in hopes of capturing night-time images of his home country from space. But he saw so much more, including this incredible image of the crescent Moon rising among bright blue noctilucent clouds. These wispy and mysterious clouds appear in Earth’s mesosphere — a region extending from 30 to 53 miles (48-85 km) high in the atmosphere — at twilight, usually in early summer. They can be seen from Earth’s northern hemisphere and, obviously, are visible from space too.
You can read about Parmitano’s night flight and see more of the images he took at his Volare blog. At the close of his image-taking night flight he says, “It’s late, and tomorrow will be a long day. With those lights still filling my eyes, I slowly close the seven windows and cross the Station to return to my sleeping pod. Not even dreams could replace the beautiful reality that revolves, oblivious, beneath us.”
Prepare yourself for some goosebumps. The Mercury spacecraft MESSENGER took this series of images of Earth eight years ago today as it swung by the planet (again) en route to its final destination.
Few humans have seen the Earth as an entire orb. Only a handful of missions, all in the Apollo era, have ventured beyond low Earth orbit. The people who traveled furthest were Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert during Apollo 13, when their spacecraft (which had been crippled by an explosion) looped around the moon on the way home.
MESSENGER is happily traveling around Mercury these days and recently recorded a cool series of images showing the planet as a colorful, spinning sphere. The spacecraft — the first to do an extended stay around that planet — has shown scientists a lot of things, including the discovery of water ice and organics.
China's now-industrialized Pearl River Delta, seen in October 1973 (top) and January 2003 (bottom)
Since the launch of its first satellite in 1972, the eight NASA/USGS Landsat satellites have made the longest continuous observations of Earth’s surface, providing invaluable data for research in agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping, global change research, as well as important emergency response and disaster relief information. In addition, having such a long span of data allows us to easily see the expansion of human development in many areas — unprecedented before-and-after views of city growth seen from space.
These images, taken over the course of the Landsat program, illustrate the visible impact of over three decades of human development:
Chandler, Arizona imaged in 1985 (top) and 2011 (bottom.) As its economy shifted from agriculture to manufacturing and electronics, Chandler’s population multiplied 8 times to over 236,000.The explosion of Istanbul’s population from 2 to 13 million people is evident in these Landsat images, comparing 1975 to 2011. Vegetation appears red in the imaging wavelengths used here.A few years ago one of the fastest-growing cities in the US, Las Vegas is seen here in images taken in 1984 (top) and 2011 (bottom.) The sprawling development — as well as the decrease in water level of Lake Mead — is evident.Some of the most dramatic — and rapid — changes have occurred in Dubai, whose palm- and continent-shaped artificial islands suddenly appear between images taken in 2000 (top) and 2010 (bottom.) Once barely visible against the desert landscape, Dubai is now an international center of business, tourism, and oil production.
The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1972, the launch of ERTS-1 (Earth Resources Technology Satellite, later renamed Landsat 1) started the era of a series of satellites that have since continuously acquired space-based land remote sensing data.
The latest satellite in the Landsat series, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) — now named Landsat 8 — was launched on February 11, 2013. Landsat 8 data is now available free to the public online here.
The face of Earth aimed toward Cassini during imaging on July 19, 2013
So along with the rest of the world, you smiled. You waved. You went outside on July 19, wherever you were, and looked upwards and out into the solar system knowing that our robotic representative Cassini would be capturing a few pixels’ worth of photons bouncing off our planet when they eventually reached Saturn, 900 million miles away. But did Cassini actually capture any photons coming from where you were? The image above will tell you.
Assembled by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (where the enormous 305-meter radio telescope is located) this image shows what side of Earth was facing Cassini when its “pale blue dot” images were obtained, at approximately 22:47 UTC (Cassini time.)
Didn’t make it into Cassini’s photo? That’s ok… maybe MESSENGER had already caught you earlier that very same day:
The view of Earth seen by MESSENGER from Mercury on July 19, 2013
Before Cassini took its images — several hours before, in fact — the MESSENGER spacecraft was holding some photo shoots of its own from 61 million miles in the other direction!
The image above shows the side of Earth that was facing Mercury on the morning of July 19, 2013, when MESSENGER was acquiring images in our direction during a hunt for any possible satellites of the innermost planet.
Earth was as bright (-4.8 magnitude) as the maximum brightness of Venus at the moment the image was taken from Mercury.
Of course, in both series of images specific details of our planet can’t be made out — Earth was barely more than a pixel in size (regardless of any bloom caused by apparent brightness.) Clouds, countries, continents, oceans… the entire population of our world, reduced to a single point of light — a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
For both portrayals, high-resolution black and white images from the GOES East and Meteosat meteorological satellites were combined with color information from NASA Visible Earth to generate true-color images of our planet as it would have looked to each respective imaging spacecraft… if they had the impossibly-precise optics to resolve Earth from such distances, of course.
But it’s ok that they don’t… we can still use our imaginations.
Earth from the geostationary weather satellite GOES East on July 19, 2013 at 5 PM EST. This is approximately the view that Cassini would have had of Earth during imaging.
Image credits: PHL @ UPR Arecibo, NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington, NERC Satellite Station, Dundee University, Scotland. Thanks to Prof. Abel Méndez (PHL/UCR) for the heads-up on these.
