The Blue Marble From Apollo 17

December 7, 2022 || 50 years ago, on December 7, 1972, an astronaut looked out the window of the Apollo 17 spacecraft and snapped a photo that would become a symbol of Earth as our precious, fragile home. The image, centered at about 40 E longitude, shows Earth at local noon near the winter solstice. Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, and Antarctica are visible under swirling clouds.Now, since 2015, NASA s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite has been imaging the sunlit side of Earth between 13 and 22 times a day from the Lagrange point 1, a million miles away from Earth. These images from EPIC show nearly identical views. The first, from Dec 7, 2022, was acquired on the 50-year anniversary of the iconic Blue Marble photo. The second, from summer solstice 2022, this image is centered further north than the original and shows Europe and Arctic sea ice. The third image, taken on December 4, 2021, nearly 49 years after the Blue Marble includes a new bonus feature: 2021’s only total solar eclipse. || June 21, 2022 || December 4, 2021

Blue Marble: Next Generation is a years worth of monthly composites at a spatial resolution of 500 meters. These monthly images, from january through December, reveal seasonal changes to the land surface: the green-up and dying-back of vegetation in temperate regions such as North America and Europe, dry and wet seasons in the tropics, and advancing and retreating Northern Hemisphere snow cover. || Blue Marble: Next Generation is a years worth of monthly composites at a spatial resolution of 500 meters. These monthly images, from January through December, reveal seasonal changes to the land surface: the green-up and dying-back of vegetation in temperate regions such as North America and Europe, dry and wet seasons in the tropics, and advancing and retreating Northern Hemisphere snow cover. The data are from 2004, from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite.For more information, visit the Blue Marble on the Earth Observatory.

The Blue Marble, October 2015 || Satellites like Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) get a complete view of our planet each day, which allows us to create beautiful images of Earth like the one shown here. While it might seem simple, it is actually a rather complex process. Multiple, adjacent swaths of satellite data are pieced together like a quilt to make one global image. Suomi NPP was placed in a unique polar-orbit around the planet that takes the satellite over the equator at the same local (ground) time every orbit. The satellite passes are generally separated by 90 minutes and the instruments image the Earth’s surface in long wedges, called swaths. The swaths from each successive orbit overlap one another, so that at the end of the day, the satellite has a complete view of the world. This composite image, captured by Suomi NPP’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), shows how the Earth looked from space on October 14, 2015—a day the contiguous United States had mostly clear skies. The movement of clouds is not easily visible between consecutive swaths of data; however, by the end of the day, the cumulative movement of clouds can be seen at the vertical seam located near the center of the Pacific Ocean. The vertical lines of haze near the equator are caused by sunglint, the reflection of sunlight off the ocean. || The Blue Marble, October 2015, Slow || Flat map texture

Blue Marble 2002 || This spectacular blue marble image was the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date in 2002. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. The full resolution version of the image is 21,600 pixels across.Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth.The land and coastal ocean portions of the image are based on cloud-free surface observations collected from June through September 2001. Two different types of ocean data were used: shallow water true color data, and global ocean color (or chlorophyll) data. Topographic shading is based on an elevation dataset compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey’s EROS Data Center. MODIS observations of polar sea ice were combined with observations from NOAA’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer. The cloud image is a composite of two days of MODIS imagery.