Five decades ago, NASA and the U.S. Geological Society launched a satellite to monitor Earth’s landmasses. The Apollo era had given us our first look at Earth from space and inspired scientists to ...

Aerosol: A collection of microscopic particles, solid or liquid, suspended in a gas. They drift in Earth’s atmosphere from the stratosphere to the surface and range in size from a few nanometers—less ...

NASA satellites and sensors constantly take the pulse of our planet, measuring how Earth changes by the day, season, year, and decade. Researchers and resource managers analyze those measurements and ...

In early March 2017, we featured the top image as our monthly satellite puzzler and as an Image of the Day. But sometimes we learn even more about an image after we publish, as people write to us with ...

This month we posed a special seasonal challenge: We asked you to join us for a remote-sensing-themed egg hunt by identifying colorful, oval-shaped lakes and ponds around the planet. Well, as one ...

All the members of our team are now in Kulusuk, Greenland. We’re quite isolated in this tiny village but we have a whole team behind us, making sure we get our stuff on time. The people in town are ...

Update on March 19, 2025: This Landsat image shows fields in southern Poland that have taken on ribbon-like shapes after generations of land division. Congratulations to Annie Burgess for being the ...

Update on March 19, 2025: This Landsat image shows fields in southern Poland that have taken on ribbon-like shapes after generations of land division. Congratulations to Annie Burgess for being the ...

All matter in the universe that has a temperature above absolute zero (the temperature at which all atomic or molecular motion stops) radiates energy across a range of wavelengths in the ...

For CSIRO scientist Catia Domingues and her colleagues, being able to show that climate simulations and observations were in better agreement than they previously seemed was only the first payoff of ...

Dating back to A.D. 870, intermittent records assembled by the Vikings record the number of weeks per year that ice occurred along the north coast of Iceland. Other, scattered records of Arctic sea ...

Near infrared (NIR) light includes wavelengths between 700 and 1,100 nanometers. Water absorbs NIR, so these wavelengths are useful for discerning land-water boundaries that are not obvious in visible ...