Investigate how and why cities expand, monitor light intensity to estimateĮnergy use and economic activity, and aid in disaster response in near-real Planet, dubbed the Black Marble, provides researchers with a unique perspectiveīy studying Earth at night, researchers can New global map of Earth at night since 2012. Our scientists have just released the first A new look using our satellite data captures the lightsĬoming from our neighborhoods, vehicles, buildings, factories, fishing vesselsĪnd other human activity brightening the night.

Early on, some of the plume observations where only made in one or two of the slits, but later observations tended to include all three slits as the plume stretched out.When the sun goes down, the lights on Earth

The instrument makes measurements through three separate slits.

The OMPS Limb instrument observations are made by looking backward (relative to NPP's orbit) toward the Earth's limb. The OMPS instrument could only see the plume during the daytime, and the NPP orbit had progressed westward away from the plume and into night by the time it was again over the plume. The third observation of the plume occurred the day following the event. NPP's second observation was farther west, close to Chelyabinsk, because the spacecraft's orbit moves from east to west. NPP's Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Limb instrument first observed the dust plume from the explosion about 1,100 kilometers east of Chelyabinsk, due to the location of the satellite's orbit. Scientists used data from the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite along with the GEOS-5 computational atmospheric model to achieve the first space-based observation of the long-term evolution of a bolide plume. The event led to the formation of a new dust belt in Earth's stratosphere. Burning from the friction with Earth's thin air, the space rock exploded 23.3 kilometers above Chelyabinsk, Russia. 15, 2013, a bolide measuring 18 meters across and weighing 11,000 metric tons, screamed into Earth's atmosphere at 18.6 kilometers per second.

Earth at night nasa