Since the agency's creation almost 50 years ago, NASA has been a world leader in space-based studies of our home planet. Our mission has always been to explore, to discover, and to understand the world in which we live from the unique vantage point of space, and to share our newly gained perspectives with the public.

That spirit of sharing remains true today as NASA operates 18 of the most advanced Earth-observing satellites ever built, helping scientists make some of the most detailed observations ever made of our world.

In celebration of its 'great observatory in the sky,' NASA is pleased to share the newest in its series of stunning Earth images, affectionately named the 'Blue Marble.' This new Earth imagery enhances the Blue Marble legacy by providing a detailed look at an entire year in the life of our planet.

In sharing these Blue Marble images, NASA hopes the public will join with the agency in its continuing exploration of our world from the unique perspective of space.

History of the "Blue Marble"

The Earth didn't appear blue in NASA's first satellite images; rather, the Television Infrared Observation Satellite, known as TIROS, beamed home images in black and white. Still, those earliest images showed that a yet-unproven method of observing the Earth from space would help improve weather forecasts.

Astronaut photographs taken during the Apollo missions provided full-color images of Earth, and fostered a greater awareness of the need to understand our home planet. In 1972, from a distance of about 45,000 km (28,000 mi), the crew of Apollo 17 took one of the most famous photographs ever made of the Earth. This original 'Blue Marble' inspired later images of the Earth compiled from satellite data.

In 2000, NASA data visualizers compiled an image of the western hemisphere using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration including GOES-8 imagery, the U.S. Geological Survey's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer, and NASA's Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor.

In 2002, NASA produced the Blue Marble, the most detailed true-color image of the Earth's surface ever produced. Using data from NASA's Terra satellite, scientists and data visualizers stitched together four months of observations of the land surface, coastal oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, photo-like mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet.

In October 2005, the creators of the Blue Marble released a new version of the spectacular image collection that provides a full year's worth of monthly observations with twice the level of detail as the original. The new collection is called the Blue Marble: Next Generation.

Like the original, the Blue Marble: Next Generation is a mosaic of satellite data taken mostly from a NASA sensor called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) that flies board NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites.

Also like its predecessor, the new Blue Marble is available free of charge to educators, scientists, museums, businesses, and the public. The collection includes images that are sized for different media, including Web and print. Users can download images of the entire globe, or just selected regions of interest.

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