Blog Archive

SMAP Under Construction: Field trip to the Spacecraft Assembly Facility

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/08/14 04:53 CDT | 1 comments

Yesterday I enjoyed my second-ever opportunity to suit up and enter the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. On display were SMAP, an Earth orbiting radar mission, and ISS-RapidScat, which will perform a different radar experiment from the Space Station.

Beautiful science by Elektro-L

Posted by Vitaliy Egorov on 2013/08/08 03:54 CDT | 5 comments

Six months ago, I wrote about the Russian weather satellite Elektro-L, which has more than two years of successful experience in the geostationary orbit. Then I promised that I would be here to share the materials that we collected. I think it's time to deliver on the promise.

Rare cloud-free view of Alaska from Terra MODIS

A rare clear day in Alaska

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/07/12 06:00 CDT | 3 comments

NASA recently shared a gloriously detailed image of an unusual clear day in Alaska as seen from the Terra satellite.

Stationkeeping in Mars orbit

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/06/27 10:55 CDT | 9 comments

It had never occurred to me to think about geostationary satellites in Mars orbit before reading a new paper by Juan Silva and Pilar Romero. The paper shows that it takes a lot more work to maintain a stationary orbit at an arbitrary longitude at Mars than it does at Earth.

Mount Taranaki, a stratovolcano in New Zealand, from Landsat

Browsing Landsat data is a lot easier than I thought it was

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/08 05:05 CST | 2 comments

With the Landsat Data Continuity Mission scheduled to launch on Monday, there's been a lot of Tweeting about Landsat, and through one such Tweet I learned about a resource that I hadn't known existed before: the LandsatLook Viewer. This is a graphical interface to more than a decade worth of Landsat data, a tremendous resource for anyone interested in Earth's changing surface, natural or manmade.

Jupiter and Io from Pleiades-1B (animation)

Pretty picture: Jupiter photo from an unusual source

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/12/26 01:02 CST | 4 comments

A recently launched Earth-observing satellite is using the stars to practice its pointing, and caught a neat animation of Jupiter.

Pretty picture: Landsat view of southern Greenland

Posted by Björn Jónsson on 2012/11/13 05:24 CST

This is a very large (19000 pixels square) mosaic of the fjords and glaciers of southern Greenland. I had been interested for a long time in experimenting with the processing of Earth satellite imagery just to get a comparison to the other planets.

GOES composite image of Earth's globe with Hurricane Sandy, October 28, 2012

Hurricane Sandy: Thanks for lives saved already

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/29 11:32 CDT

Today hurricane Sandy is a major threat to life and property across the west coast of the northern Atlantic ocean. I just want to give thanks in advance to all the people who have devoted their careers to making sure that Americans have sufficient warning of devastating, unstoppable weather events like this one.

Earth observing satellites record large Arctic ozone loss

Posted by Jason Davis on 2011/10/14 06:31 CDT

Data from Earth observing satellites Aura and CALIPSO have shown record losses of seasonal ozone in the Arctic.

NPP, the NPOESS Preparatory Project satellite photo

Earth science's next big thing

Posted by Jason Davis on 2011/09/22 11:27 CDT

Meet the next big thing in NASA's mission to study planet Earth: NPP, the NPOESS Preparatory Project satellite.

India's launch site as seen by Japan's Daichi orbiter, now lost

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/25 12:22 CDT

I wrote the following blog entry about an image from Japan's Daichi Earth-observing orbiter last week as one to keep in my back pocket for a day when I was too busy to write, not anticipating that there'd soon be a more pressing reason to write about Daichi. On April 21, after just over five years of orbital operations, Daichi unexpectedly fell silent, and is probably lost forever.

Glory Lost - But Its Mission Must Go On

Posted by Charlene Anderson on 2011/03/04 01:16 CST

Another painful loss to NASA's mission to study Earth from space: Today a Taurus XL rocket failed to lift the Glory satellite into Earth orbit when its clam-shell nosecone refused to open, forcing the rocket and its payload into the southern Pacific Ocean.