Image from TERRA
Tue, 18 Apr 2023 16:24 EDT

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, located in Katmai National Park, forms a unique and ashen landscape. Encircled by volcanoes – both active and inactive – it has served as a perfect collection area for huge amounts of volcanic ash.

Image from TERRA
Tue, 20 Sep 2022 10:30 EDT

Water departments in the West are using maps and models originally created by a NASA team to help track water.

Image from TERRA
Thu, 15 Sep 2022 10:00 EDT

NASA and Google broadened an existing partnership to help local governments improve their monitoring and prediction of air quality for better decision making.

Impacts from Orbital Drift

Impacts will be minimal, but noticeable in data and imagery. Longer shadows will be visible in images, especially in images of mountain landscapes. The sensors’ views will become narrower leading to smaller swath widths as Terra drifts to an earlier crossing time. 

The effects will be most noticeable in ASTER imagery, which has the narrowest width of any of Terra’s sensors because of its higher resolution imagery, but each of Terra’s sensors will be impacted.

Impacts to science is expected to also be minimal and could prove beneficial to some areas of research, like land morphology, surface temperature, and how measurement time impacts climate data sets.

Impacts to Data and Impacts to Science are currently being researched and assessed. Researchers who have been impacted by these changes are encouraged to contact us.