Google says it’s the most comprehensive picture of the planet ever made available to the public.

“The images were collected as part of an ongoing joint mission between the USGS and NASA called Landsat,” explains Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach. “Their satellites have been observing earth from space since the 1970s—with all of the images sent back to Earth and archived on USGS tape drives that look something like this example (courtesy of the USGS).”

“We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online,” she adds. “Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.”

Finally, Google worked with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon Uinversity to convert the Earth images into HTML5 animations.

The imagery is constructed from millions of satellite images, and is even zoomable. Here are some examples:

Here’s Google’s Timelapse site. Here’s Time’s.

“Today we are celebrating Earth Day with an interactive doodle that captures a slice of nature’s subtle wonders. We hope you enjoy discovering animals, controlling the weather, and observing the seasons. Use the sightseeing checklist below to make sure you do not miss anything!” says Doodler Leon Hong.

Indeed, Google has provided a Doodle checklist. So, click around and have fun.

Earth Day, as we know it, is celebrated on April 22nd. Back in 1969, the first Earth Day was proposed at a UNESCO conference in San Francisco to be celebrated on March 21st. A month or so later, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson held an additional Earth Day on April 22nd, as an environmental teach-in. In 1990, the April celebration went international, and it is currently celebrated in nearly 200 countries worldwide.

Last year, Google’s Earth Day doodle was also animated, though not quite interactive. The doodle was a time lapse photo of flowers blooming and eventually forming the Google logo.

The newly discovered belt of radiation was observed for four weeks before a shockwave from the sun blew it apart. The new belt could improve researchers’ understanding of how the belts react to space weather, and in particular solar winds. The research was published this week in the journal Science.

“Even 55 years after their discovery, the Earth’s radiation belts still are capable of surprising us and still have mysteries to discover and explain,” said Nicky Fox, Van Allen Probes deputy project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “We thought we knew the radiation belts, but we don’t. The advances in technology and detection made by NASA in this mission already have had an almost immediate impact on basic science.”

The new belt was detected by the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) on-board the Van Allen Probes. The probes discovered that a region thought to be one belt had actually become two distinct belts with space in between.

“This is the first time we have had such high-resolution instruments look at time, space and energy together in the outer belt,” said Daniel Baker, lead author of the study and REPT instrument lead at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado. “Previous observations of the outer radiation belt only resolved it as a single blurry element. When we turned REPT on just two days after launch, a powerful electron acceleration event was already in progress, and we clearly saw the new belt and new slot between it and the outer belt.”

The Van Allen Probes were launched back in August with the mission of studying the Van Allen belts and how space weather can affect them. By December of last year data from the probes was already revealing to scientists just how much influence the sun has over the Earth’s magnetosphere.

“The fantastic new capabilities and advances in technology in the Van Allen Probes have allowed scientists to see in unprecedented detail how the radiation belts are populated with charged particles and will provide insight on what causes them to change, and how these processes affect the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science.

“High-quality planetary maps and 3D terrain models have become essential for NASA to plan exploration missions and conduct science,” says Google in the video description. “This is particularly true for robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, where maps are used for site selection, traverse planning, and planetary science. This is also important for studies of climate change on Earth, where maps are used to track environmental change (such as polar ice movement).”

“In this talk, we will describe how the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames builds highly accurate, large-scale planetary maps and 3D terrain models from orbital imagery using novel statistical stereographic and photometric techniques,” it says. “Orbital imagery includes data captured by the Apollo missions, on-going NASA and international missions, and commercial providers (such as Digital Globe). The mapmaking software that we have developed (Vision Workbench, Ames Stereo Pipeline, Neo-Geography Toolkit) is available as open-source and is widely used by scientists and mission planners.”

More recent At Google Talks here.

The new images depict the glow of both natural and human-made light all across the planet. A new sensor on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite launched last year has allowed scientists to observe the Earth more accurately than ever during the night. According to NASA, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor is sensitive enough to detect the glow produced by the light from a single ship at sea.

“For all the reasons that we need to see Earth during the day, we also need to see Earth at night,” said Steve Miller, a researcher at NOAA’s Colorado State University Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere. “Unlike humans, the Earth never sleeps.”

The video below shows the images as a globe and describes just what it is that is creating the bright parts of the images. Aside from electric light from cities and towns, ships on the Nile River, oil fires in the Middle East, and wildfires in the Australian Outback can be seen. Of particular intrest, as always, is the stark contrast between North Korea and South Korea. The sharp line of the Korean Demilitarized Zone can clearly be seen, illustrating just how different life is for Koreans on either side of the 38th parallel.

“The sun has been a driver of these systems more than we had any right to expect,” said Daniel Baker, Principal Investigator for the Van Allen Probes Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado. “We’re seeing brand new features we hadn’t expected. We expected to see a fairly placid radiation belt system. Instead, we see that the belts have been extraordinarily active and dynamic during the first few weeks. We’re looking in the right places at the right times.”

Events from the sun, such as solar eruptions and plasma ejections have caused “dramatic” changes in the radiation belts. The Van Allen Probes have measured these changes using identical sets of five instrument suites. Measurements using the Electric Fields and Waves Suite (EFW) and the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) are helping researchers understand how fields and waves of electricity and magnetism affect charged particles within the belts.

“The electric field and magnetic field measurements on the Van Allen Probes are the best ever made in the radiation belts,” said Craig Kletzing, principal investigator for EMFISIS at the University of Iowa. “For the first time, we’ve been able to see how long intense low frequency electric fields and waves at the edge of the radiation belts can last – sometimes for over five hours during geomagnetic storms. Before, it was like we could see a car zoom past, but not see anything about the details. Now, we can see what color the upholstery is.”

NASA also revealed that the Van Allen Probes have been taking a beating in orbit. The inner radiation belt where they orbit is also where the most hazardous and energized particles orbit. The probes were built to be tough, and are discovering that the density of these particles varies at different altitudes, using their Relativistic Proton Spectrometer (RPS) instruments.

(Image courtesy JHU/APL)

Spoiler alert: Humans have only been around for about 77 seconds.

From AsapSCIENCE, who continues to educate the world on the science behind life’s biggest questions – from morning wood to the zombie apocalypse. And from Let’s Make a Deal to severe intoxication. Man, I love these guys.

The views of crepuscular rays sprayed across an alien planet makes one wonder about Mars and what mysteries it has. Did Mars have life millions of years ago that was destroyed? Is it as desolate now as it was a billion years ago? These are questions that we are looking to answer as we edge closer and closer to landing on Mars.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera took this image of the Earth and the Moon at a distance of 88 million miles away from Mars.

Gizmodo, who posted the picture, also spoke with Robert Simmon, a scientist at the NASA Earth Observatory”

“Elektro-L is a Russian Satellite similar to GOES (the satellites that provide the cloud image loops shown on the news every night). The images posted by Gizmodo are a combination of visible and near-infrared wavelengths, so they show the Earth in a way not visible to human eyes (vegetation looks red, for example). They’re not any better or worse than NASA images, but they show different things.”

“It’s a geostationary weather satellite orbiting above the equator at ~54˚ East. Tthe US has two similar operational geostationary satellites over the east and west coasts, EUMETSAT has one over Europe and one over the Indian Ocean, Japan has one over the far western Pacific.”

Similar high-def pictures exist from NASA, although they do not utilize the near-infrared spectrum that Elektro-L does, and appear exactly as you might see them with the naked eye.

Just for fun, here are some other views from satellites orbiting earth. This is taken from the International Space Station (ISS).

No clue where this is from, or even if its real. Enjoy.

This one is definitely fake. It was created using the open-source animation and rendering software Blender. But it’s still cool, showing the Earth flying through space.

[source: Gizmodo]

Chris currently has his project on indiegogo.com, and while he met his goal of $8,000 dollars, he needs more to complete his real dream. He wants to give his program away to schools and universities as a learning tool. If he gets to $13000, he can donate some copies of The Solar System to Science World in Vancouver BC. With $16000 he will start handing out pc versions for free to school and educational institutions.

His project became noticed when his roommate got word of a youtube video and posted it to Reddit.com. Within a few days his video had 50,000 views on Youtube and he was on his way. After he reached his goal of $8,000 he made a blog update that said: “So I have achieved the financial security I wanted to complete this project while surviving for the next few months.” The project has 16 days left to make as much money as possible. And remember that the more he gets in donations, the more copies he can give to schools in need.

Check out the video of the utterly amazing solar system model that he created: