Here’s a super high resolution video taken from the International Space Station (link via i09):
From the caption:
This timelapse video was made from images taken by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst orbiting Earth on the International Space Station.
The video is offered in Ultra High Definition, the highest available to consumers. Be sure to change the settings in YouTube if your computer or television can handle it for the full effect.
The montage is made from a long sequence of still photographs taken at a resolution of 4256 x 2832 pixels at a rate of one every second. The high resolution allowed the ESA production team to create a 3840 x 2160 pixel movie, also known as Ultra HD or 4K.
Playing these sequences at 25 frames per second, the film runs 25 times faster than it looks for the astronauts in space.
The artistic effects of the light trails from stars and cities at night are created by superimposing the individual images and fading them out slowly.
Alexander Gerst is a member of the International Space Station Expedition 40 crew. He is spending five and a half months living and working on the ISS for his Blue Dot mission.
2 September 2014: Sentinel-1A has added yet another string to its bow. Radar images from this fledgling satellite have been used to map the rupture caused by the biggest earthquake that has shaken northern California in 25 years.
Scientists collaborating through the UK Natural Environment Research Council’s Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET), used Sentinel-1A’s special capabilities to analyse the quake.
‘Synthetic aperture radar interferometry’ is a technique where two or more satellite radar images of the same area are combined to detect large-scale surface changes. Small changes on the ground modify the reflected radar signal and lead to rainbow-coloured fringes in the ‘interferogram’.
Yngvar Larsen from Norway’s Northern Research Institute and Petar Marinkovic from PPO.labs in the Netherlands processed this new interferogram from two images: one that Sentinel-1A acquired on 7 August, the day the satellite reached its operational orbit, and another captured on 31 August.
It clearly confirms that part of the West Napa Fault system was responsible for the 6.0 earthquake that rocked California’s wine-producing region. However, the fault had not been identified as being particularly hazardous prior to the quake that hit on 24 August.
Importantly, the extent of the ground deformation in the interferogram shows that the fault slip continues further north than the extent of the rupture mapped at the surface.
Sharp lines in the interferogram show minor movements on other faults, such as the part of the West Napa Fault system that crosses Napa airport.
COMET Director, Tim Wright, from University of Leeds said, “This successful demonstration of Sentinel-1A marks the beginning of a new era for our ability to map earthquakes from space.
“COMET scientists are building a system that will provide these results routinely for all continental earthquakes, as well as mapping the slow warping of the ground surface that leads to earthquakes.”
Prof. Andy Hooper, also at the University of Leeds, added, “This satellite represents a sea change in the way we will be able to monitor catastrophic events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the future, due to its systematic observation strategy.”
Austin Elliott, a PhD student at the University of California Davis, one of the team mapping the earthquake rupture on the ground, said, “The data from satellites are invaluable for completely identifying the surface break of the earthquake – deformation maps from satellite imagery guide us to places where rupture has not yet been mapped.”
Although Sentinel-1A is still being commissioned, ESA was able to respond specifically to the incident and provide data rapidly to the science team.
Betlem Rosich-Tell, ESA’s Project Manager for the Copernicus Sentinel-1 Payload Data Ground Segment, noted, “I’m very pleased to see that the dedication from the various Sentinel-1 ground segment teams, both at ESA and at industry, meant that we could react to an emergency at this early stage in the mission and provide an ‘out-of-the-box utilisation’ of Sentinel-1A data.
“The Sentinel-1 ground segment is designed to fully exploit the potential of the mission by acquiring, processing and delivering a huge amount of high-quality data products in a timely manner for both operational and scientific applications.”
Sentinel-1A passes over the same spot on the ground every 12 days. However, once its identical twin, Sentinel-1B, is launched in 2016, this will be cut to just six days, so that changes can be mapped even faster.
Right now there are around 1,800,000 images at the Johnson Space Center database (The Gateway of the Astronauts). Around 1,200,000 images were taken aboard the ISS (date 02/20/2014). However, the number of classified images is much smaller, and there is no archive of georeferenced images. There is already a project to classify the daytime images (Image detective), but the techniques used in that project are not useful for the classification of nighttime images. The patterns on Earth are not the same during the day and night, which is why another technique is needed to classify these nighttime images.
Our main objective is to study light pollution that comes from cities. We want to stop the waste of energy and the destruction of the mighty ecosystem.
Your collaboration is really important because algorithms cannot distinguish between stars, cities, and other objects (i.e. moon). Thus, we need your help to assess the light pollution in our world!
Also you can contribute on our other apps Lost at night (find unlocated images) and NightCitiesISS (Georeference known cities). Also you can track the project’s updates at our blog.
This CNN video shows a sample of earth images in the gallery:
NASA is helping students examine their home planet from space without ever leaving the ground, giving them a global perspective by going beyond a map attached to a sphere on a pedestal. The Sally Ride Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students (Sally Ride EarthKAM) program provides a unique educational opportunity for thousands of students multiple times a year.
Damascus as seen from the International Space Station acquired via EarthKAM. Image Credit: NASA/EarthKAM
EarthKAM is an international award-winning education program, allowing students to photograph and analyze our planet from the perspective of theInternational Space Station. Using the Internet, students control a special digital camera on the orbiting laboratory to photograph Earth’s coastlines, mountain ranges and other interesting geographical topography. The camera has been aboard the orbiting outpost since the first space station expedition began in November 2000 and supports approximately four missions annually.
Schools around the world are lining up to participate in the program, which is growing by leaps and bounds. The most recent mission, July 15-19, set summertime records, drawing nearly 36,000 students from 562 schools and summer programs in 34 countries across six continents. Mission organizers believe they may set more participation records when the fall session begins Sept. 29. EarthKAM officials have scheduled two new sessions that are set to begin in the next few months. Interested teachers or students can still sign up at the EarthKAM website.
A Canadian student from Good Shepherd School in Peace River, Alberta, studies orbital paths of the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA
“This program will help our students become more scientifically literate,” said Annie Bourque, a teacher with Barnstead Elementary School in New Hampshire, one of the hundreds of schools that signed up for the recent summer mission. “We want them to understand how new technology can help design tools to improve our ability to measure and observe our world. Real, current photographs of the Earth are powerful learning tools, especially when the students have a hand in creating them.”
“The goal of the investigation is to cast the net wide and encourage all students to take advantage of this great opportunity from the space station,” said Cindy Evans, Ph.D., International Space Station associate program scientist for Earth Observations at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “It is also a great way for future scientists and engineers to explore the many aspects of spaceflight.”
Students learn about Earth science including human geography, geology, ecology and global change, as well as the intricacies of what it takes to live and work in space, such as orbital dynamics, mission operations, scales, precision and accuracy. The outreach program staff is made up of a group of students attending the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), who have been accepted into the EarthKAM Voluntary Internship Program. They operate as flight controllers, giving them training and inspiration for the next generation of space engineers.
A view of the Sally Ride EarthKAM hardware set-up for use
in the Lab Window Observation Research Facility (WORF) aboard
the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA
In order to participate in the research platform, middle-school students must first learn about spacecraft orbits and Earth photography. They then request their desired images by tracking the orbit of the space station. This includes checking the weather to make sure the station will have a clear view.
UCSD collects the requests and, with help from representatives at Johnson, uplink them to a computer on the space station. The computer transmits requests to the digital camera, which snaps the images. The photos are downlinked to computers on the ground and, within hours, the EarthKAM team makes the images available on the web for easy access by schools, as well as the public. Students can explore the pictures and make connections with the topics they are studying. They can review a particular lesson not only from textbooks and atlases, but also by using real images of geographical objects and analyzing the data obtained.
EarthKAM is designed to be an inquiry-based investigation for students, but it also provides wide latitude for implementation and focus. The image database with all of the photos taken since 2001 and the educational tools on the website can be tailored for a few afternoon classes or semester-long courses. Teachers and schools — including home schools — can build their lesson plans to support a variety of educational standards that fit within their curricular constraints.
“Their enthusiasm to learn more about our home is awe-inspiring,” said Pete Hasbrook, associate program scientist in the International Space Station Program Science Office at Johnson. “EarthKAM gives us the opportunity to interact with these students and show them the practical applications of what they are currently studying and how they can build on that knowledge to help NASA investigate our planet.”
Students are able to participate actively in spaceflight by taking and seeing images of Earth. They also learn critical scientific fundamentals, obtaining a taste of operational pressures and pursuing their own interests about viewing Earth’s surface. This allows students to think globally and, if they are in involved in multiple missions, look for changes.
The image collection and accompanying learning guides and activities are resources that allow EarthKAM to support lessons in Earth science, space science, environmental science, geography, social studies, mathematics, communications and art. Whether students are participating during summer school or planning an EarthKAM mission in the coming school year, they will find the program a source of inspiration as they learn about their world.
The onslaught of up-close exploration in recent years has yielded a ton of information. The Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey,Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter missions have pored over the planet’s surface with a bunch of different sensors that can detect everything from the types of minerals present on the surface, to the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, to the structure of the shallow subsurface. These orbiters showed that much of the planet’s surface is older than scientists thought. The area formed more than 4 billion years ago (the darkest brown on the map) is three times as large. The new map also backs up the idea that Mars was geologically active until recently, and that liquid water once was present on the surface.
Abstract:
This global geologic map of Mars, which records the distribution of geologic units and landforms on the planet’s surface through time, is based on unprecedented variety, quality, and quantity of remotely sensed data acquired since the Viking Orbiters.
These data have provided morphologic, topographic, spectral, thermophysical, radar sounding, and other observations for integration, analysis, and interpretation in support of geologic mapping.
In particular, the precise topographic mapping now available has enabled consistent morphologic portrayal of the surface for global mapping (whereas previously used visual-range image bases were less effective, because they combined morphologic and albedo information and, locally, atmospheric haze).
Also, thermal infrared image bases used for this map tended to be less affected by atmospheric haze and thus are reliable for analysis of surface morphology and texture at even higher resolution than the topographic products.
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