Picture of the Day: Blue Marble, 2017
Image Credit: NOAA/NASA - Editor: Sarah Loff
The release of the first images from NOAA’s newest satellite, GOES-16, is the
latest step in a new age of weather satellites. This composite color full-disk
visible image is from 1:07 p.m. EDT on Jan. 15, 2017, and was created using
several of the 16 spectral channels available on the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline
Imager (ABI) instrument. The image shows North and South America and the
surrounding oceans. GOES-16 observes Earth from an equatorial view
approximately 22,300 miles high, creating full disk images like these,
extending from the coast of West Africa, to Guam, and everything in between.
GOES-16, formerly
known as GOES-R, is the first spacecraft in a new series of NASA-built advanced
geostationary weather satellites. NASA successfully
launched the satellite at 6:42 p.m. EST on Nov. 19, 2016, from Cape
Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. NOAA manages the GOES-R Series Program
through an integrated NOAA-NASA office. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland, oversees the acquisition of the GOES-R series spacecraft
and instruments.
That’s here. That’s
home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever
lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings,
thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every
hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every
hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every
teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme
leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on
a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
