The Earth Observatory image of the day for June 5 shows flooding in Botswana’s Savuti River and Savuti Swamp. The abundant water turns out to be a very small part of a much bigger picture. The Savuti Swamp sits within the Kalahari Desert, which stretches across Namibia, Angola, Zambia, South Africa, and most of Botswana. More […]
Training Day & Area Control Centre
Eni Njoku Arrived yesterday evening (Monday June 4) and settled into the Hilton Suites, Winnipeg near the airport. The Twin Otter had arrived a couple of days earlier from Grand Junction, Colorado via Wyoming and is hangared at Winnipeg airport. Training (First Day) Early Tuesday morning we headed for the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) […]
I Can See My Home from Here — Landsat Contest
From the Landsat team at NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey… To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Landsat Earth-observing program — which first rocketed into space on July 23, 1972 — NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey will be giving something special to members of the American public. NASA will create customized Landsat chronicles […]
Mollusks, corals, carbon, and volcanoes
Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. These are the major eras in the history of life on Earth, and the transition from one period to another has been marked by a major turnover in fossils — one assemblage of organisms going extinct and being replaced by another. Today paleontologists agree that the biggest extinction in the fossil […]
Make a Movie, See a Launch
In case you missed it, NASA is sponsoring a video contest starring your home planet. The winner will receive behind-the-scenes access to the launch of NASA’s next major Earth-observing satellite — the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) — from Vandenberg Air Force Base in January 2013. Most of the public tends to focus on NASA’s […]
Question from Facebook: What Controls the Thickness of a Storm’s Dust?
We recently posted an image of a dust storm in the Middle East (see below) that prompted one of our Facebook followers to ask why the dust is thicker near the left part of the image than the right. He wondered if the layer of dust is usually thickest near the origin of dust storms. […]
PALS to Grand Junction
Friday April 27 the PALS instrument was packed up by Barron and Seth and shipped by truck to Grand Junction, Colorado to be installed on the Twin Otter aircraft assigned to the SMAPVEX12 campaign. This is the first leg of the PALS journey to Winnipeg, the site of the field campaign. Monday April 30 Seth […]
Checking in and checking out of spring break
The past few weeks have been rough on Earth-observing satellites. But there was some good news and some engineering prowess to go along with the troubles.
SMAP and SMAPVEX12
SMAPVEX12 stands for the 2012 Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Validation Experiment. The SMAP mission… SMAP is a NASA Earth science satellite mission that uses microwave radar and radiometer instruments to measure soil moisture from space. The radar and radiometer share a six-meter mesh reflector antenna that rotates at approximately 14 revolutions per minute. The […]