NASA Earth Observing Fleet including GPM

  • Released Monday, January 27, 2014
  • Updated Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 1:57PM
  • ID: 3996
A newer version of this visualization can be found here.

This animation shows the orbits of NASA's current (as of January 2014) fleet of Earth remote sensing observatories. The satellites include components of the A-Train (Aqua, Aura, CloudSat, CALIPSO), two satellites launched in 2011 (Aquarius, Suomi NPP), and eleven others (ACRIMSAT, SORCE, GRACE, Jason 1 and 2, Landsat 7, Landsat 8, GPM, QuikSCAT, TRMM, and EO-1). These satellites measure tropical rainfall, solar irradiance, clouds, sea surface height, ocean salinity, and other aspects of the global environment. Together, they provide a picture of the Earth as a system.

This is an update of visualization #4070. The orbits are based on orbital elements with epochs in April of 2013. The visualization spans twenty-nine hours, from 04:10 UT on April 14, 2013 to 09:24 UT on Aril 15, 2013. Some simulated orbits where added, such as GPM, as they had not launched at the time these visualizations were created.

Two versions of this visualization are provided. The first colors the orbits blue except that TRMM is colored green and GPM is colored red. The second visualization colors all of the orbits blue.

NASA's Earth observing fleet including GPM (in red) and TRMM (in green)

NASA's Earth observing fleet including GPM (all orbits colored blue)

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

Terra and Aqua BMNG (A.K.A. Blue Marble: Next Generation) (Collected with the MODIS sensor)

Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

Dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

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CelesTrak Spacecraft Orbit Ephemeris
Ephemeris

Dataset can be found at: http://celestrak.com

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GEOS-5 Cubed-Sphere (A.K.A. GEOS-5 Atmospheric Model on the Cubed-Sphere)
ModelNASA GMAO

The model is the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 30-days. GEOS-5 is described here http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos5/ and the cubed-sphere work is described here http://sivo.gsfc.nasa.gov/cubedsphere_overview.html.

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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.

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