NASA Posts 'Global Selfie' From Thousands of Earth Day Submissions
The "Global Selfie" mosaic the National Aeronautics and Space Administration created for this year's Earth Day has gone up -- on the Internet, that is.
The space agency, you may recall, invited people around the world to step outside, wherever they were on or around April 22, Earth Day, take a "selfie" picture of themselves and their environs and then send the image to NASA via social media.
NASA had said it planned to develop a unique view of our home planet, created entirely from those use the selfies it received.
And now the Global Selfie itself, compiled with more than 36,000 individual photographs drawn from the 50,000 or so images tagged #GlobalSelfie and posted on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr, is posted for all the world to see.
"With the Global Selfie, NASA used crowd-sourced digital imagery to illustrate a different aspect of Earth than has been measured from satellites for decades: a mosaic of faces from around the globe," Peg Luce, deputy director of NASA's Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate, said in an agency news release. "We were overwhelmed to see people participate from so many countries. We're very grateful that people took the time to celebrate our home planet together, and we look forward to everyone doing their part to be good stewards of our precious Earth."
NASA said in the release it was sent selfies from "every continent and 113 countries and regions, from Antarctica to Yemen, Greenland to Guatemala, and Pakistan to Peru."
The resulting mosaic is a zoomable 3.2-gigapixel image that users can scan and explore to view individual photos.
Assembled after several weeks of collecting and curating the submitted selfies, the GigaPan image of Earth is based on views of each hemisphere captured on Earth Day 2014 by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite, MASA said.
A joint mission between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Suomi NPP collects data on both long-term climate change and short-term weather conditions.
NASA explained the Global Selfie project was designed to encourage environmental awareness and recognize the agency's ongoing work to protect our home planet; for the first time in more than a decade, five NASA Earth Science missions are scheduled to launch within the same calendar year.
The missions launched will include the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory, a joint mission with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which actually lifted off in February.
As well, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 is set to launch in July, while the Soil Moisture Active Passive mission is set to blast off in November. Two other Earth science instruments -- RapidScat and the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System -- will be transported to the International Space Station.
The Global Selfie mosaic and related images and videos are available at: https://go.nasa.gov/1n4y8qp
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