All articles tagged with #earth observation
NASA’s Landsat 9 regularly points its sensors at the Moon during the full Moon to detect and correct drift, using the Moon’s stability as a reference to keep decades of Earth observations consistent, a process that runs alongside Artemis’ return to lunar exploration.
NASA’s satellite images reveal significant shifts in Earth's nighttime illumination, with rapid increases in lighting in growing urban centers across developing regions, signaling accelerating urbanization and energy use; the nighttime glow provides a new metric for tracking population trends and development over time.
NASA’s Earth Observatory highlights autumn fog in eastern Victoria as the Terra satellite’s MODIS instrument captures morning valley fog in the Victorian Alps and an arch-shaped cloud drifting over Port Phillip Bay. The piece explains radiation fog forms when air cools to the dew point in calm conditions, sinks into valleys, and lingers where terrain shades the ground; nearby breezes interacting with the bay’s terrain likely shaped the arch cloud, which moved south as the fog faded.
NASA and IBM’s open-source Prithvi geospatial AI foundation model was uploaded to two in-orbit platforms—the Kanyini satellite and the ISS-mounted IMAGINE payload—making it the first geospatial foundation model deployed in space. Trained on 13 years of Landsat/Sentinel-2 data, Prithvi demonstrated flood and burn-scar detection and can be updated on orbit with small decoder packages, enabling faster Earth observation analyses and potential natural-language interactions with onboard instruments in the future.
SpaceX will launch 45 payloads on an overnight Falcon 9 rideshare from Vandenberg, headlined by Korea’s CAS500-2 Earth observation satellite, with 44 secondary satellites from multiple partners deployed into Sun-synchronous orbit. Booster B1071 is targeting a landing at LZ-4 after liftoff, marking another milestone for SpaceX’s reusable rocket program. The mission includes satellites from Exolaunch, Loft Orbital, IRIDE, True Anomaly, Planet Labs and others, illustrating growing international collaboration to increase on-orbit capacity.
NASA, via its Kennedy Space Center and in partnership with the USGS, has promoted a Landsat-based tool that lets people spell out their name or any word using publicly available Landsat satellite imagery. The images are processed into false-color views that highlight environmental features, showcasing how letters can appear in natural landscapes (e.g., an “A” shape formed by Lake Mjøsa, Norway, and a lowercase “g” near Fonte Boa, Brazil) and noting Landsat’s long history of Earth observation since 1972. The feature, which first surfaced in Camp Landsat in 2024, is available online for users to try, illustrating how imagery can reveal patterns in land use and environment while offering a playful take on satellite data.
NASA's Earth Observatory released a striking image of a roughly 10-km-wide pink heart in Salinas Las Barrancas, Argentina, photographed from the International Space Station on January 16, 2024. The pink color comes from carotenoids produced by the microalga Dunaliella salina under intense light and high salinity; as evaporation raises salinity, dying cells feed halophilic archaea and bacteria that intensify the hue. The lake is an active salt-extraction site and the heart's shape is a geological accident, reflecting seasonal changes in this shallow brine environment.
NASA marks Earth Day by recounting how Earth observation has advanced—from Apollo 8’s Earthrise to Artemis II’s Earthset—through radar and imaging missions like NISAR and INCUS, plus ongoing data from PACE and VIIRS, to monitor sea level rise, ice loss, weather, and urban growth and to inform agriculture, wildfires, droughts, floods, and other hazards.
NASA’s Earth Observatory features an ISS image of the Capital Beltway’s northeast side near Greenbelt, Maryland, highlighting Greenbelt Park and surrounding green spaces amid suburban development, with nearby institutions like the Goddard Space Flight Center and University of Maryland noted; the photo, taken July 30, 2023, captures a landscape shaped by New Deal planning and ongoing preservation of green spaces.
A 2010 NASA Earth Observatory image shows Gee Lake bending across the snowy rim of the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, the last remnant of Canada’s ancient Laurentide Ice Sheet. The roughly 3.2-kilometer lake sits at the edge of a glacier up to 500 meters thick, where meltwater has carved grooves that appear as ridges across the ice. The Barnes Ice Cap, exposed in this scene as snow-free at the edge, dates back about 20,000 years and is shrinking like other Arctic glaciers due to warming temperatures; a 2017 study estimated most of the ice could disappear within about 300 years. The image illustrates how small melt lakes and glacial dynamics shape this ancient landscape and how the Laurentide legacy continues to influence oceans and sea-level rebound today.
Earthrise to Earthset uses two images taken 58 years apart to highlight how CO2 rose from about 320 ppm in 1968 to ~430 ppm in 2026 and the global mean temperature climbed about 1.2°C, fueling more extreme heat, Arctic ice loss, glacier melt and sea-level rise. The warming tracks with increasing Earth energy imbalance and is amplified by El Niño events; with forecasts of another El Niño later in 2026, temperatures could push past recent records, underscoring the urgency of reaching net-zero emissions.
A 2023 Landsat-8 image captures the moment when Guyana’s Cuyuni, Mazaruni and Essequibo rivers converge near Bartica to form a large waterway with a striking color split. The lighter Cuyuni carries more suspended sediment, while the Mazaruni and Essequibo are darker due to tannins from vegetation decay; the different densities of the river waters slow mixing at the junction, creating the half-and-half effect that reflects both the country’s geology (the Guiana Shield) and upstream mining impacts.
ESA’s daylight-focused Sentinel-2A was activated during night passes and produced unexpectedly clear images of gas flares in Qatar and Iraq, a wildfire in India, and fishing boats off South Korea, demonstrating potential for nighttime Earth observation and informing future mission requirements as the Copernicus program progresses with additional Sentinel-2 satellites.
ESA tested Sentinel-2A’s ability to image at night, obtaining useful nighttime observations of gas flares, wildfires, city lights and fishing boats, to inform the design of the future Sentinel-2 Next Generation mission while Sentinel-2B and -2C continue core operations.
Sentinel-1D, Europe's latest Earth observation satellite, achieved a record-breaking 50-hour turnaround from launch to first images, capturing high-resolution radar data of Antarctica, Europe, and maritime activity, demonstrating rapid response capabilities and advancing climate and environmental monitoring.