As London's Summer Olympic Games capture the attention of billions of viewers worldwide, it’s worth remembering that the city and surrounding areas have been imaged from space for many years. Check out three different views of London that show why the Landsat 7 satellite's Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus sensor is far more than just a camera.
Billions of people will see London through a wide array of filters and lenses during the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, but none of those views will look quite like this nighttime snapshot from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite.
Since 1972, Landsat has collected more than 3 million images that describe two generations of human imprints on Earth and the planet's effects on humanity.
On July 11, 2012, more than 25,000 hectares (97 square miles) of forests were burning in Russia, according to the Russian Federal Forestry Agency. Most of the fires”uncontrolled wildfires in boreal forests”were in central and eastern Siberia, as shown in this image acquired on July 10 by NASA's Aqua satellite.
Images from NASA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite show the power outages in the clear skies over Washington, D.C., and Baltimore that occurred on June 29, 2012. The outages were the result of a derecho, a rare, fast-moving thunderstorm system that packs the power of a tornado.
A layer of stratocumulus clouds over the Pacific Ocean served as the backdrop on June 21, 2012, when NASA's Terra satellite captured this rainbow-like optical phenomenon known as a glory. An added viewing bonus in this image is the swirling von Karman vortices visible to the right of the glory.
There have been many images of the full disc of Earth from space, but few have looked quite like this. Using natural-color images acquired by the recently launched Suomi-NPP satellite, a NASA scientist has compiled a stunning new view showcasing the Arctic and high latitudes.
NASA's Aqua satellite observed ice retreat in Hudson Bay, which typically begins in May and can melt out completely sometime in July. In the April 2012 image, abundant ice makes individual features difficult to distinguish. However, in the June 2012 image, Akimiski Island and the Belcher Islands seem to magically appear.
The Sor Kaydak in Kazakhstan is a salt marsh that leads into the northeastern bulb of the Caspian Sea. The central 50 kilometers of the 180-kilometer marsh depression is shown in this photograph from the International Space Station.
A DigitalGlobe image shows the world's largest hand-painted flag, created by artist Scott LoBaido, on the 3.5-acre roof of Lamons Gasket Company near William P. Hobby Airport in Houston.
