Meet NASA's Earth-Observing Fleet
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- Written by:
- Adam P. Voiland
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- Scientific consulting by:
- Max J. Suarez and
- William Putman
- View full credits
TRMM. Landsat 7. Terra. ACRIMSAT. EO-1. Jason 1. GRACE (twice). Aqua. ICESat. SORCE. Aura. CloudSat. CALIPSO. Jason 2. And, as of June 2011, Aquarius. None of the acronym-heavy Earth-observing satellites seen in the visualization below have achieved the name recognition of big-ticket NASA missions like Apollo or Hubble. But unmanned probes are quietly beaming down information that has transformed our understanding of how the Earth works and what we know of the human fingerprint on climate. Together they represent a mission to planet Earth as ambitious as any NASA has made to the Moon or Mars. One of the oldest functioning satellites in the fleet, TRMM, monitors precipitation; the newest, Aquarius, measures the salinity of the ocean. The next to launch in October 2011—NPP—will continue a suite of atmospheric, ocean, and land surface records initiated decades ago. The visualization shows the precise orbit tracks of twenty current and former Earth-observing satellites (not including Aquarius), as well as the International Space Station and Hubble.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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Animators
- Ernie Wright (USRA)
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC)
- Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
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Writer
- Adam P. Voiland (SSAI) [Lead]
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Scientists
- Max J. Suarez (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
- William Putman (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Producer
- Michelle Williams (UMBC)
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Project support
- Eric Sokolowsky (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
Related Pages
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ID: 3725 Visualization
NCCS Hyperwall Show: Earth Observing Fleet with GEOS-5 Clouds
Read moreA newer version of this visualization can be found here.This visualization is an update to a previous visualization of NASA's Earth observing fleet of spacecraft. Also incuded in this version are a couple of commercial spacecraft as well as the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. The spacecraft ephemerides are from February 2010.The clouds are from a simulation using the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Verison 5 (GEOS-5). The global atmospheric simulation ran at a resolution of 7-km per grid cell and covered a period from Feb 2, 2010 through Feb 22, 2010. The results of the simulation were written out at 30 minute intervals.This visualization was created for display on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall. This is a set of tiled high definition displays consisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels across by 2304 pixels down. This movie was rendered at this high resolution, then diced up into images to be displayed on each screen. ||
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