The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument is one of NASA’s five Earth-observing instruments. Launched on December 18, 1999, on the Terra satellite, ASTER “images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet” by capturing high-resolution (15 to 90 square meters per pixel) images of the Earth. Since then, more than 2.95 million images were captured. The content “ranges from massive scars across the Oklahoma landscape from an EF-5 tornado and the devastating aftermath of flooding in Pakistan, to volcanic eruptions in Iceland and wildfires in California”. Users can view a fraction of the images from this website, while the rest can be accessed from a series of different tools provided.
Wikimedia Commons is a “media file repository” of public domain and freely-licensed educational media content, including images, sounds and video clips. Launched on 7 September 2004 by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Commons uses the “wiki-technology” that is the same technology used in Wikipedia. Wikmedia Commons also aggregates files from other projects, including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, Wikisource, and Wikinews. As of October 2015, there are more than 28.7 million files in more than 120,000 collections. Users can conduct a keyword search or browse the content by topic, type, author, location, license and source.
The Project Apollo Archive was first created in 1999 by Kipp Teague. It contains photographs pertaining to the historic manned lunar landing program – Apollo. According to Teague, the archive is “a re-presentation of the public domain NASA-provided Apollo mission imagery as it was originally provided in its raw, high-resolution and unprocessed form by the Johnson Space Center on DVD-R and including from the center’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth web site”. All digital images are scanned from the original photographs taken by Hasselblad cameras.
As part of the EOS Project Science Office located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the mission of the Earth Observatory is “to share with the public the images, stories, and discoveries about the environment, Earth systems, and climate that emerge from NASA research, including its satellite missions, in-the-field research, and models”. Users can do a keyword search or browse images by different categories. Users can also generate images of global maps to explore key parts of the Earth’s climate system. The images are based on data provided by the NASA satellites.
The images on this site are contributed by Superfamous Studio, a design agency led by Dutch designer Folkert Gorter.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA in short, is an American agency that pioneers in aeronautics research, space explorations and operations, space technology and science. Their image galleries provide access to non-copyrighted up-to-date images and other multimedia files that were captured from their operations, missions and research.
