NASA’s Final Image of Earth, 2010
This "full-disk image" of North and South America was captured by the GOES-13 satellite on December 30 at 1445 UTC (9:45 a.m. EST). Credit: NOAA/NASA GOES Project. Image coutesy of www.NASA.com.
On December 30th, NASA’s GOES-13 (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) captured one of the last images of our planet in 2010. It was a poignant and gorgeous image that “shows cloud cover associated low pressure areas over the upper Midwestern U.S. and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains” (NASA), as the world turned one more time towards the New Year. The little green and blue rock probably felt its business as usual – unaware of the significance that this particular rotation held for its now 7 billion population.
Heres what NASA tells us of it’s GOES Project:
NASA’s GOES Project, located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., procures and manages the development and launch of the GOES series of satellites for NOAA on a cost-reimbursable basis. NASA’s GOES Project also creates some of the GOES satellite images and GOES satellite imagery animations. NOAA manages the operational environmental satellite program and establishes requirements, provides all funding and distributes environmental satellite data for the United States.
NASA’s GOES Project was very busy this year. GOES-13 monitors the eastern continental U.S., Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, while GOES-11 monitors weather conditions over the western U.S. and the Eastern Pacific Ocean.
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[...] last five years have heavily contributed to these figures – the intentional destruction of an old weather satellite by the Chinese as part of an anti-satellite weapon test in 2007, and the accidental clash [...]