COVID-19 Earth Observing Fleet

  • Released Tuesday, December 22, 2020
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COVID-19 Earth Observing Fleet

This animation shows the orbits of satellites that NASA is using to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the environment. It includes assets from our domestic partners, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey, our international partners, such as the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and our commercial partner Planet Labs.

Together, our combined measurements are providing the spatial and temporal breadth to more fully characterize and understand how society’s changing behavior during the pandemic is affecting the Earth system.


The clouds used in this version are from a high resolution GEOS model run at 10 minute time steps interpolated down to the per-frame level.

Spacecraft included:

NASA
Aqua
Aura
Suomi NPP: Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership
OCO-2: Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2
Terra
Landsat 7
Landsat 8
ISS: International Space Station

International
Sentinel-1
Sentinel-2
Sentinel-5P
GOSAT
ALOS-2

Commercial
Planet Labs 178 nanosatellites

Credits

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

This page was originally published on Tuesday, December 22, 2020.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 12:17 AM EST.

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.