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Satellite Imagery of Natural Phenomena

NASA satellite images capturing various environmental phenomena, including fires, volcanoes, and atmospheric conditions, with a focus on geological changes.

Venous doppler test in the lower limbs (observation of the after-effects post-phlebitis).
Venous doppler test in the lower limbs (observation of the after-effects post-phlebitis).
161 assets in this story
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These side-by-side, 3-D comparisons depict the unnamed lunar mountain targeted by the NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission for controlled impact of the Ebb and Flow spacecraft.
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Nighttime Temperatures on Southern Io
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Thermal Electric Energy Conversion Module Cross reference to camera file 45548446
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NASA's CloudSat passed over Sandy at 10:32 a.m. EDT on Oct. 27, 2012. Light to moderate precipitation associated with parts of the outer bands of Hurricane Sandy were moving on shore into parts of North Carolina.
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Changing Lightning Storms on Jupiter
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Caramelized sugar
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Comparison of data from NASA's Cassini's radio and plasma science instrument, which can detect ring particles striking the spacecraft as it crosses the plane of the rings, on Dec. 18, 2016 (at top) and on April 26, 2017 (at bottom).
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MESSENGER Explores Interactions between Mercury's Magnetosphere and the Solar Wind
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. SWOT Captures the Yukon River in Alaska. The mighty Yukon River and nearby lakes appear in red in this image produced using data recorded on June 18, 2023, by the international Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite as it passed over Alaska. The satellite measures the height of nearly all the water on Earth's surface, providing one of the most detailed, comprehensive views yet of the planet's ocean and fresh water. The mission is a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency, CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales). SWOT will address some of the most pressing climate change questions of our time, offering insights into areas including how a warming world is accelerating Earth's water cycle, leading to more volatile precipitation patterns. SWOT will also help researchers better understand how climate change affects water storage in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and how communities can better manage water resources and prepare for floods and other disasters.
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Mars Gravity Anomoly Map
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This composite of images from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft shows the eight circumpolar cyclones around a central cyclone located at Jupiter's north pole. The sizes of these cyclones range from 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) to 1,740 miles (2,800 kilometers) across about the same distance from the southern tip of Texas to the border with Canada. The composite depicts the remarkable stability of the octogonal configuration No cyclones have arrived or disappeared since Juno began its mission in 2016. The evolution of Juno's elliptical orbit is bringing the spacecraft closer to the north pole on each pass. At the beginning of Juno's mission the northern polar cyclone was hidden in polar night, but as the Sun moves toward the northern hemisphere, it is beginning to emerge into the daylight. As a visible camera JunoCam can only take pictures when the cyclones are in daylight, it took four perijove passes to see all eight. The original JunoCam images used to produce this
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Water Past and Present
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Research on chronic bacterial infections within Inserm. PhD student working on brucellosis bacteria with the help of a flow cytometer.
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High Spectral Resolution Image of Stripe
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This map from NASA's Dawn mission shows the global distribution of hydrogen on the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta.
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Infrared thermovision image panorama of Zagreb, showing difference temperature
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Measurements by NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal temperatures in a high layer of Saturn's atmosphere known as the stratosphere and show the dramatic effects of the massive storm deep below.
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Using NASA's Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers have discovered that comet Hartley 2 possesses a ratio of 'heavy water' to light, or normal, water that matches what's found in Earth's oceans.
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Entering Saturn's Magnetosphere with a Boom
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Belarus vs Canada Basketball, smoke flag, Sport game
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Radar Flyby of Titan - April 30, 2006
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NASA's Curiosity Mars rover targeted the laser of the ChemCam instrument with remarkable accuracy for assessing the composition of the wall of a drilled hole and tailings that resulted from the drilling.
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NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument is able to peel back cloud cover to reveal 3-D structure of a storm's water vapor content, information that can be used to improve weather forecast models.
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Tectonic Complexity in Mercury's Impact Features
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Acquired by NASA's Terra spacecraft on in 2011, this image shows the Wadi As-Sirhan Basin in northwest Saudi Arabia, which has been steadily developing agricultural fields using center pivot irrigation by tapping into fossil ground water.
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Then and Now These images illustrate the dramatic improvement in NASA computing power over the last 23 years, and its effect on the number of grid points used for flow simulations. At left, an image from the first full-body Navier-Stokes simulation (1988) of an F-16 fighter jet showing pressure on the aircraft body, and fore-body streamlines at Mach 0.90. This steady-state solution took 25 hours using a single Cray X-MP processor to solve the 500,000 grid-point problem. Investigator Neal Chaderjian, NASA Ames Research Center At right, a 2011 snapshot from a Navier-Stokes simulation of a V-22 Osprey rotorcraft in hover. The blade vortices interact with the smaller turbulent structures. This very detailed simulation used 660 million grid points, and ran on 1536 processors on the Pleiades supercomputer for 180 hours. Investigator Neal Chaderjian, NASA Ames Research Center; Image Tim Sandstrom, NASA Ames Research Center
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This map, made from data obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows the distribution of pyroxene, an iron- and magnesium-rich mineral, in the southern hemisphere of the giant asteroid Vesta.
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This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from the location where it landed in August 2012 to the 'Pahrump Hills' outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp.
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Map showing mountain ridge terrain, illustration
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This graphic demonstrates the hiss-like radio noise generated by electrons moving along magnetic field lines from the Saturnian moon Enceladus to a glowing patch of ultraviolet light on Saturn.
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Heart scintigraphy. Gamma scan of a heart affected by ischemia during physical activity (lack of blood).
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3-D image from NOAA Exclusive Economic Zone Mapping Project. Blow-up of area right at base of Oregon continental slope. oblique lineations at base of continental slope; are real features as sounding system artefacts are farther to west. 1989
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Data from the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity show an unusual enrichment of silicon in the rocks dubbed 'Wildrose' and 'Bonanza King,' relative to other rocks studied at Gale Crater on Mars.
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Digitized thermal analysis of the steel basement of the ALMA antenna.
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This global infrared map of Titan was composed with data from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer taken during the last two Titan flybys
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This set of images illustrates how the science filters of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity can be used to investigate aspects of the composition and mineralogy of materials on Mars.
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Sensory nerve fibers innervate muscles and tendons, ligaments, joint capsule to carry proprioceptive impulses to the central nervous system 3D illustration. nerve fibers innervate muscles and tendons, ligaments, joint capsule to carry impulses to the central nervous system.
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This graphic combines a perspective view from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the 'Botany Bay' and 'Cape York' areas of the rim of Endeavour Crater on Mars, and an inset with mapping-spectrometer data.
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NASA's Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer instrument (AVIRIS), flying aboard a NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center high-altitude ER-2 aircraft, observed wildfires burning in Southern California on Dec. 5-7, 2017. AVIRIS is an imaging spectrometer that observes light in visible and infrared wavelengths, measuring the full spectrum of radiated energy. Unlike regular cameras with three colors, AVIRIS has 224 spectral channels, measuring contiguously from the visible through the shortwave infrared. Data from these flights, compared against measurements acquired earlier in the year, show many ways this one instrument can improve both our understanding of fire risk and the response to fires in progress. The top row in this image compilation shows pre-fire data acquired from June 2017. At top left is a visible-wavelength image similar to what our own eyes would see. The top middle image is a map of surface composition based on analyzing the full electromagnetic spectrum, reveali
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This image shows a region of the sea floor off the coast of northwest Greenland mapped as part of NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission. The data shown here will be used to understand the pathways by which warm water can reach glacier edges.
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These two images were created using data from NASA's Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR).
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This sea surface height map of the Gulf of Mexico and the northwestern Caribbean Sea, with the Florida peninsula on the upper right, is based on altimeter data from three satellites including NASA's Jason-1.
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What's on the Inside Counts
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Changes Observed in Just 4.5 Months at Prometheus, Io
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Optical Coherence Topography (OCT) image, showing a macular map. On this image, the left eye to prevent glaucoma.
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Launched Sept. 21, 2014, to the International Space Station, NASA's newest Earth-observing mission, the International Space Station-RapidScat scatterometer to measure global ocean near-surface wind speeds and directions.
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The Western United States has been entrenched in an Extreme and Exceptional drought that has extended from the summer and into the fall of 2020. NASA's ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) imaged the drought on Oct. 16, 2020, and compared the same area to an image from ECOSTRESS taken a year earlier on Oct. 16, 2019. The bottom image shows the percentage change in plant water stress from 2019 to 2020. The images at left zoom into the Arizona and New Mexico border and Navajo Nation Territory area, featuring the ECOSTRESS Evaporative Stress Index (ESI), which shows plant water stress. The inset images on the right zoom further into the region, showing circular agricultural fields that have been irrigated. Blue colors represent low stress and high water use, whereas red colors represent high stress and low water use. Irrigation is able to alleviate plant water stress in many of the fields while the surrounding landscape suffers from the drought,
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Martian Temperatures Measured by the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES). Isidis Planitia View
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Hematite Abundance on Martian Surface
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Surface weather map - Map of isobars.
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Holden Crater, a Finalist Not Selected as Landing Site for Curiosity
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Unfrozen brine in cryopegs and fracture networks provides habitats for the survival and growth of organisms both within and under frozen rocky materials on Earth and, by analogy, could provide habitats on Mars.
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More Than 60 Sites Considered for Next Mars Rover Landing
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jsc2020e030483 (4/20/2020) --- A preflight image sequence from parabolic flight experiments indicating motion of vapor bubble on heated ratchet surface. Asymmetric Sawtooth and Cavity-Enhanced Nucleation-Driven Transport (PFMI-ASCENT) demonstrates a passive cooling system for electronic devices in microgravity using a microstructured surface. When fluids boil over flat heated surfaces in microgravity, vapor bubbles grow larger in size, causing poor heat transfer that can lead to damage of devices. Adding microscopic rachets on the surface may passively enable mobility of vapor bubbles and prevent this damage.(Image courtesy of: Techshot, Inc.)
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History Leaves Salts Behind
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When the polar vortex dips south it often makes headlines. Frigid air, usually confined to the arctic, spills into lower parts of the continent making it a chilly challenge for people going about their day. But there's a warm part to the story as well. While the eastern and southern United States were shivering in January the arctic was experiencing above average temperatures. In maps created with data by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA's Aqua satellite, warmer-than-normal temperatures are colored in red and below average temperatures are colored in blue. Provided in geographic and polar projections, the maps show regions of unusually cold air hovering over the eastern and southern U.S., eastern Canada and Greenland in January. February shows colder-than-normal air blanketing the northwest U.S., Canada, Western Europe, northwest Africa and East Asia. In both cases, the arctic remains exceptionally warm. During most winters the polar vortex is like a giant counterclockwi
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Observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have detected carbon-dioxide snow clouds on Mars and evidence of carbon-dioxide snow falling to the surface.
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High Spectral Resolution Image of Barnacle
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As the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite of instruments on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover heats a sample, gases are released (or 'evolved') from the sample and can be identified using SAM's quadrupole mass spectrometer.
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The graph at right presents information from the NASA Curiosity Mars rover's onboard analysis of rock powder drilled from the 'Big Sky' and 'Greenhorn' target locations, shown at left.
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The yellow triangles on this graph indicate concentrations of the elements titanium and silicon in selected rock targets with high silica content analyzed by the APXS instrument on NASA's Curiosity rover in Mars' Gale Crater.