Earth and the planets sit in the crosshairs of multiple streams of solar power. Giant explosions on the sun, called coronal mass ejections, blast electrically charged particles across the solar system, where they are deflected by Earth's strong magnetic field. As the sun endlessly emits solar radiation, a different kind of protective layer—Earth's gaseous atmosphere—shields the planet from harmful rays. But it is the radiation that penetrates the atmosphere and is absorbed by Earth's surface that makes life possible and drives a remarkable planetary engine—the climate. This narrated animation uses NASA satellite and model data to illustrate the fundamental power of the sun and how its energy drives the winds and ocean currents on Earth. It is an excerpt from "Dynamic Earth: Exploring Earth's Climate Engine," a fulldome, high-resolution movie now playing at planetariums around the world. ||

The walls within some craters at the moon's poles have gone without sunlight for as long as two billion years. Known as permanently shadowed regions, these craters lie almost perpendicular to the sun, never receiving its warmth or light. By bouncing laser beams off the moon's surface, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mapped the shape and elevation of these incredibly dark areas. Detailed 3-D models constructed from the data, combined with data collected by other instruments aboard the spacecraft, reveal which craters are fully hidden from the sun's rays, and which crater floors are cold enough for chemicals such as water to build up in the lunar soil. Watch the video to learn more. ||

The Mona Lisa is already one of the most famous paintings in the world, but it’s now being recognized for another reason: a digital version of it traveled 240,000 miles to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA satellite orbiting the moon. A black and white image of the painting was divided into an array of pixels, and each pixel was converted into one of 4,096 shades of gray. The image piggybacked on signals already being used to track the satellite, enabling simultaneous tracking and communication. Different shades of gray were represented by delaying the transmission of each laser pulse by a precise amount of time. After correcting transmission errors caused by Earth’s atmosphere, the demonstration became one of the first successful examples of laser communication at planetary distances, a method capable of much higher data transmission than traditional radio signals. Watch the video to learn more. ||

To better understand how Earth evolved, scientists are pointing cameras toward impact craters on the moon. Impact craters are giant surface depressions that form in the aftermath of collisions by asteroids, meteoroids and comets. Exposure to wind, water and geologic activity slowly degrades impact craters found on Earth. But by knowing how a crater has changed over time, scientists can piece together clues of what conditions were like on the planet long ago. Now, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft is collecting images of impact craters on the moon’s surface. Unlike on Earth, these craters aren’t prone to weathering because the moon has practically no atmosphere. As a result, some have remained untouched since the day they were born. Scientists will use the images to determine how natural disasters and the climates of Earth’s past have shaped how its craters look today. Watch the video to learn more. ||

Since the early 1990s, astronomers have known that distant planets orbit stars light-years from Earth. Although most of these alien worlds, called exoplanets, are too far away to be imaged directly, scientists have made detailed observations of their size and composition. One method of study involves watching a planet as it transits its host star. By measuring how the brightness and color of a star changes when a planet crosses in front of its disk, astronomers can indirectly determine the mass of the planet and the proximity of its orbit. Similar measurements can provide other key information, like the chemical makeup of a planet's atmosphere. Watch the video to learn more. ||

In December 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to orbit the moon. But as NASA astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered in space was Earth. Using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the moment when the crew first saw and photographed Earth rising from behind the moon was recreated. The key to the new work is a set of images of the lunar surface captured by a camera mounted in the Apollo 8 Command Module's rendezvous window. By registering each image to a model of the moon’s terrain, the orientation of the spacecraft and window from which each photo of Earth was taken can now be known. Watch the video to learn more. ||

This compilation video contains visualizations of Earth and Space Sciences resulting from supercomputer models. The excerpted visualizations include: Ocean Planet, El Niño, Ozone 1991, Clouds, Changes in Glacier Bay, Alaska, Biosphere, Lunar Topography from the Clementine Mission, Musculoskeletal Modeling Dynamic Simulations, Simulations of the Breakup and Dynamical Evolution of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, Convective Penetration in Stellar Interiors, Topological Features of a Compressible Plasma Vortex Sheet: A Model for the Outer Heliospheric Solar Wind, R-Aquarii Jet, The Evolution of Distorted Black Holes, Rayleigh-Taylor Instability in a Supernova, Galaxy Harassment, N-Body Simulation of the Cold Dark Matter Cosmology. ||

This animation was produced for the Smithsonian Institution's HoloGlobe Exhibit which opened to the public on August 10, 1996. The various orthographic data sets showing progressive global change were mapped onto a rotating globe and projected into space to create a holographic image of the Earth. Showing Earthandapos;s atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and biosphere are dynamic, changing on timescales of days, minutes, or even seconds. This animation is a revised version of Animation #96 [The HoloGlobe Project (Version 1)]. ||

This videotape tours the Solar System and outer space using scientific visualizations from Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the HPCC Earth and Space Sciences Project. At the Sun, simulations investigate processes that create magnetic field and release energetic particles. Earth science begins with the Pacific Ocean, studying the 1997-98 El Niño and Cyclone Susan. Crossing the globe, visualizations trace North America's East Coast and ocean currents in the North Atlantic Ocean. The lights of the world's cities then show human impact. Next, two models probe nearby-space phenomena, fluid behavior in microgravity conditions and an asteroid collision. A jaunt to Mars explores the mountains and trenches of its dry, rocky exterior. The video concludes at a binary neutron star system, where two city-sized objects with the Sun's mass merge in a titanic explosion. ||

The Digital Earth is a virtual representation of our planet that enables a person to explore and interact with the vast amounts of natural, cultural, and historical information being gathered about the Earth. This video describes the need for such a system, possible uses of a Digital Earth system, and the technologies and organizations that must come together in order for it to become a reality. ||