Week in Geek – Earth from above edition

If you like data and images of Earth from space, you are going to freak over these 2.95 million satellite images now available online.

The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) is a combined effort between NASA and Japan’s Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI), as well as the scientific communities in both countries. ASTER is an instrument aboard the Terra satellite, part of NASA’S Earth Observing System (EOS), which was launched in 1999 into a near-polar, sun-synchronous orbit (meaning it passes over the same spot on Earth at the same solar time each day).

NASA recently uploaded almost three million images from ASTER to the interwebs which you can now browse via categories such as Archaeology, Geology, Hydrology, Cities, and Volcanoes, to name just a few. You can also access the full data archive directly.

Here’s just a small sampling of what you’ll find:

Recommended

MS NOW Opinion

We don’t need nuclear reactors on the moon

Joseph Cirincione

Deadline: Legal Blog

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs argues ‘freak offs’ protected by First Amendment

Jordan Rubin

Here’s some more geek from the week:

• Ecologists at the University of Liverpool have found the gene responsible for the famous black peppered moth’s color morphing.
• Young fish exposed to high amounts of plastic microbeads end up preferentially eating plastic as they mature.
• King Tut had a dagger made from meteorites, even before the Iron Age.
• This Twitter account @CinemaPalettes tweets the color palettes of famous movie scenes.
• If you like the card game SET, you’ll love this related puzzle mathematicians just solved.
• Amazing reconstruction of Blade Runner through neural network encoding is so good it fooled Warner Brothers. [VIDEO]
• Cool data visualization/animation showing how the world’s airports are connected. [VIDEO]
• NASA’S Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft are the first to fly directly through a magnetic reconnection event.
• That heart shaped plain on Pluto continues to reveal its secrets to NASA’s New Horizons team.

Keep on geeking!

@Summer_Ash, In-house Astrophysicist