What is blue marble NASA?
The Blue Marble is an image of Earth taken on December 7, 1972, from a distance of about 29,000 kilometers (18,000 miles) from the planet’s surface. NASA has also applied the name to a 2012 series of images which cover the entire globe at relatively high resolution.
Why does the Earth look like a blue marble from space?
It takes about 365 days for the Earth to go around the sun one time. When you look at Earth from space, it looks like a big, blue marble. The Earth looks blue because of water. Most of Earth is covered with water.
What is the blue marble called?
The term ‘Big Blue Marble’ as it applies to Earth refers to an image captured of our planet by the Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972. The image — officially designated as AS17–148–22727 by NASA— was taken at 29 thousand kilometres above the Earth by the crew of the spacecraft as it headed to the Moon.
What is significant about the Apollo 17 blue marble picture?
This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica South polar ice cap. This is the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the South polar ice cap. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible.
Is the blue marble a composite?
Today the space agency unveiled what it’s calling the “most amazing high definition image of Earth — Blue Marble 2012.” This one was taken “from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite — Suomi NPP,” NASA says, and is a “composite image [that] uses a number of swaths of the …
Why the Earth is called blue planet?
Planet Earth has been called the “Blue Planet” due to the abundant water on its surface. No liquid water has been confirmed in our solar system, but it is likely that Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus have liquid oceans under a frozen crust.
What does blue marble look like?
Blue marble is a natural stone capable of visually connecting us with the sky and the sea. Sodalite Blue, composed of lazulite, calcite, and pyrite, creates a velvety cobalt sea furrowed by golden waves. Macaubas Blue features a crystalline sky-blue background with white, and orange striations.
Is blue marble rare?
Brazilian Sodalite: higher quality material (super-premium type) characterized by an intense and uniform blue, with rare veins. The scarcity of blocks makes it a very rare natural stone.
Why is the Blue Marble upside down?
It’s an unmistakable portrait of a living world and it is arresting. (The true camera image is upside-down by earthly standards, showing the South Pole at the top of the globe, because the camera was held by a weightless man who didn’t know down from up. Most reproductions invert it to align with our expectations.)
Is there a real picture of Earth?
Nasa has released the first picture of the Earth that it has taken in 43 years. The picture, which has come from a camera on board the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), is the first picture of the whole Earth that has been seen since 1972.
Are there any new Blue Marble photos?
A new weather satellite has relayed its first images of Earth back to scientists, and the new collection, which includes an updated version of the iconic “Blue Marble” image of Earth, is simply stunning. In its first publicly released set of images, GOES-16 captured the planet in intricate detail.
What is the spatial resolution of Blue Marble?
The original Blue Marble was a composite of four months of MODIS observations with a spatial resolution (level of detail) of 1 square kilometer per pixel. Blue Marble: Next Generation offers a year’s worth of monthly composites at a spatial resolution of 500 meters.
What is Blue Marble Earth imagery?
This new Earth imagery enhances the Blue Marble legacy by providing a detailed look at an entire year in the life of our planet. In sharing these Blue Marble images, NASA hopes the public will join with the agency in its continuing exploration of our world from the unique perspective of space.
What is the Blue Marble project?
The Blue Marble: Next Generation is a series of images that show the color of the Earth’s surface for each month of 2004 at very high resolution (500 meters/pixel) at a global scale.
What file types are available for Blue Marble images?
Full-resolution, subsetted, and reduced-resolution files are available as JPEG, PNG, and GeoTIFF via the Blue Marble Next Generation collection on NASA’s Visible Earth and through the NASA Earth Observations (NEO) archive. Blue Marble: Next Generation was produced by Reto Stöckli, NASA Earth Observatory (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center).