The Earth's Blue Marble image released by NASA on 25 January 2012, which showed the western hemisphere, generated over 3.1 million views, making it one of the all time most viewed images on the site after only one week. It was so popular that NASA scientists, responding to public demand, created a companion image - that of the Eastern Hemisphere, as shown below. This new image was released by NASA on 2 February 2012.
Earth's Eastern Hemisphere - Blue Marble 2012.
How was this new image created? It is a composite of six separate orbits taken on 23 January 2012 by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite. The satellite is in a polar orbit around Earth at an altitude of 512 miles (about 824 kilometres), but the perspective of the new Eastern hemisphere 'Blue Marble' is from 7,918 miles (about 12,743 kilometres). NASA scientist Norman Kuring managed to 'step back' from Earth to get the big picture by combining data from six different orbits of the Suomi NPP satellite. Or putting it a different way, the satellite flew above this area of Earth six times over an eight hour time period. Norman took those six sets of data and combined them into one image. The following image explains how composite images like these are created.
How Earth's Eastern Hemisphere image was created.
Source:
1. VIIRS Eastern Hemisphere Image - Behind the Scenes by NASA
2. Eastern Hemisphere - Blue Marble 2012 by Flickr
3. Blue Marble 2012 - "How To" by Flickr
1. VIIRS Eastern Hemisphere Image - Behind the Scenes by NASA
2. Eastern Hemisphere - Blue Marble 2012 by Flickr
3. Blue Marble 2012 - "How To" by Flickr
I thought the earth is not perfectly spherical? Is NASA is proving it the other way around?
ReplyDeleteIzad.
Salam Izad,
DeleteHmm...good question. Earth is not exactly spherical as it is bulging at the equator due to its spin around its own axis. The seemingly spherical shape is attributed by its own gravitational pull from all
directions.
Still, NASA used a new highly sophisticated equipment to come up with the new image. At least we see earth from a different perspective, unless of course someone comes up with a contradicting view. We keep on learning new things...
Alizul