Happy Earth Week! This year NASA has created unique opportunity just in time for Earth Day for interested participants to “Adopt the Planet.” There are 64,000 locations available from adoption.
When you visit the website you can fill in your name and then receive a certificate with your adopted patch of Earth. The adoption certificate gives you specific coordinates of your location on our globe as well as satellite data layers relevant to your piece of Earth. You can use WorldView, NASA’s web-based satellite viewing application, to explore your adopted point over time and with different layers.
I received a point on the coast of Antarctica. It was cool to explore a part of our planet that I don’t normally think about on a daily basis. With the WorldView application I was able to see how it changes over the seasons from solid ice to open ocean. WorldView even has the ability to animate these observations.
This outreach event allows us the appreciate our planet from space and helps us learn about some of the space instruments that are continuously monitoring and circling our planet.
