Earth Observing Fleet

  • Released Tuesday, March 17, 2015
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Like orbiting sentinels, NASA’s Earth-observing satellites vigilantly monitor our planet’s ever-changing pulse from their unique vantage points in orbit. This animation shows the orbits of all of the current satellite missions. The flight paths are based on actual orbital elements. These missions—many joint with other nations and/or agencies—are able to collect global measurements of rainfall, solar irradiance, clouds, sea surface height, ocean salinity, and other aspects of the environment. Together, these measurements help scientists better diagnose the “health” of the Earth system.

This animation will be regularly updated to show the orbits of the current earth observing fleet.

This most recent version, published in March 2017, includes the CYGNSS constellation and DSCOVR at L1. Visit the original page here.


Previous versions from recent years include:


entry 4274 a February 2015 version including SMAP

entry 3996 a spring 2014 version including GPM

entry 4070 a May 2013 version which added Landsat-8

entry 3892 a Dec 2011 version which added Suomi NPP and Aquarius

entry 3725 a version from June 2010

HD resolution movies of NASA's Earth Observing fleet.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Tuesday, March 17, 2015.
This page was last updated on Sunday, April 7, 2024 at 11:58 PM EDT.

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Datasets used in this visualization

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.