An especially bright and powerful aurora over the Pacific Northwest was captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station on Jan. 20, 2016.
Minisatellite Monitors Massive Australian Smoke Plume
The European Space Agency (ESA) Proba-V minisatellite collected imagery in early 2016 of an enormous smoke plume from a bushfire south of Perth in Western Australia.
New Map Uses Gravity to Model Ocean Floor
An international scientific team recently published a new map of the ocean floor based on Earth's gravity field to help submariners and ship captains with navigation, particularly in previously uncharted areas.
Flooding Continues along Mississippi River
The Mississippi River Valley has been experiencing record floods after a series of storms brought heavy rains to the region in late December 2015. The torrential rainfall pushed some parts of the Mississippi River and its tributaries to record-high levels, particularly for the time of year.
1968 Earthrise Image Reimagined
Near the 47th anniversary of the iconic Earthrise image captured by Apollo 8 astronauts while they orbited the Moon on Dec. 24, 1968, the modern Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) broadcast new images that show a similar scene, with the Moon in the foreground and the distant Earth in the background.
Toxic Mining Sludge Entering Atlantic Ocean
On Nov. 5, 2015, an iron-ore tailings dam in Bento Rodrigues, a subdistrict of Mariana, Brazil, suffered a catastrophic failure, causing flooding and at least 13 deaths.
Sentinel Shows Dutch Density
Bordered by the North Sea to the north and west, Germany to the east, and Belgium to the south, The Netherlands has a population of 17 million. With more than 400 people per square kilometer, it's one of the most-densely populated countries in the world.
SOHO Celebrates 20 Years in Space
Originally launched in 1995 by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA to study the sun and its influence out to the edges of the solar system, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) revolutionized heliophysics, providing the basis for nearly 5,000 scientific papers.
Southern Spring Sees Phytoplankton Blooms
As a reminder that spring is relative depending on Earth's hemisphere, phytoplankton blooms, which were especially troublesome in the northern hemisphere's 2015 spring, have now been spotted via satellite in the southern hemisphere's spring.
Longest Water Bridge Seen from Space
Sentinel-2A, which has been in orbit since June 2105, captured this false-color image of Qingdao, China.
