NASA's Orbiting Earth Observing Fleet (NASM 2010)

  • Released Thursday, September 16th, 2010
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:54PM
  • ID: 3763

NASA's Earth Observing fleet of vehicles constitutes a major milestone in the history of Earth science, facilitating the kinds of wide scale and synergistic research endeavors that until the last decade have been impossible to even consider. Many of the techniques being employed around Earth are a direct offshoot of technological and scientific techniques developed on missions to other worlds. NASA's continued commitment to primary research about our home remains a top priority not only to the agency, but to the nation, and the world as a whole. This visualization shows the spacecraft in NASA's Earth Observing fleet. The relative altitudes, speeds, sun position, and clouds are correct during a portion of February 2010.

This version of the orbital fleet was created for a talk by Piers Sellers at the National Air and Space Museum. About half-way through this visualization, the spacecraft that are beyond their designed lifetimes are faded to gray. The only spacraft still within its designed lifetime when this visualization was created was Jason-2.

Earth observing fleet in orange with spacecraft that have exceeded their design lifetimes fading to gray

Earth observing fleet with all spacecraft in orange

Earth observing fleet with spacecraft exceeding their designed lifetimes in gray and the single mission (Jason-2) that is still within its designed lifetime in orange

Earth observing fleet in orange with spacecraft that have exceeded their design lifetimes fading to gray. This version is 2 minutes in length.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Datasets used in this visualization

CelesTrak Spacecraft Orbit Ephemeris
Ephemeris

Dataset can be found at: http://celestrak.com

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GEOS-5 Cubed-Sphere (A.K.A. GEOS-5 Atmospheric Model on the Cubed-Sphere)
Model NASA GMAO

The model is the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 30-days. GEOS-5 is described here http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos5/ and the cubed-sphere work is described here http://sivo.gsfc.nasa.gov/cubedsphere_overview.html.

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Hipparcos Tycho Catalogue (A.K.A. Tycho 2 Catalogue) (Collected with the Telescope sensor)
Database

Dataset can be found at: http://archive.eso.org/ASTROM/

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