Greenland is capped with a vast ice sheet that spans 1.7 million square kilometers (656,000 square miles) and measures more than 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) at its thickest point. Below all this ice lies a landscape human eyes have never seen directly. But a newly developed method for mapping this hidden bedrock has produced the
NASA’s Earth-observing satellite missions track dozens of features of a changing planet — aerosols, sea levels, land cover, cloud cover — over years and decades. Sustaining that record for the scientific and operational communities who depend on it requires more than engineering talent. It requires planning for an uncertain future: anticipating where a mission delay
At the top and bottom of the planet, the seasons arrive on a schedule all their own. Satellite data from a mission measuring infrared energy reveal just how differently—and how dramatically—surface temperatures swing across two full years at the poles. In this animation, surface temperatures across the Arctic and Antarctic pulse between cold (dark blue)