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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Radar topographic view of a volcano
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/17 12:20 CST
Quick -- where is this? Is it one of Venus' iconic volcanoes? Or maybe Mars'?
Another day, another natural disaster on Earth seen from space...
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2005/09/29 08:14 CDT
...but this one is much closer to home than Katrina and Rita were.
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