A Busy Season for Crop Fires in Northwestern India
Shedding Light on Greenland
Iceberg A-68A Nears South Georgia
Terra: the EOS Flagship
Terra explores the connections between Earth's atmosphere, land, snow and ice, ocean, and energy balance to understand Earth's climate and climate change and to map the impact of human activity and natural disasters on communities and ecosystems.
Terra's five sensors help us understand out changing planet and provide critical data used in applications from food security, volcanic monitoring, wildfire safety, public health, and climate modeling. Terra's twenty years of data continue to contribute to how we understand Earth and how we respond when disasters strike.
Terra's suite of instruments allows us to understand our world well beyond what we knew twenty years ago, when Terra launched. In those twenty years, new applications and contributions to science have been made possible.
There is no question that technology has changed. But, at the same time that our lives on Earth were being shaped by our access to technology, 705 kilometers above us, a satellite was changing how we understood our planet.
For 20 years, Terra, the flagship Earth observing satellite,
has chronicled changes on Earth. Designed and built in the 1980s and 90s, NASA and Lockheed Martin engineers set out to build a satellite that could take simultaneous measurements of Earth’s atmosphere, land, and water. Its mission – to understand how Earth is changing and to identify the consequences for life on Earth. Season after season, Terra data continues to help
us understand how the evolving systems of our planet affect our lives – and how
we can use that data to benefit society. Read more and find resources from our anniversary events, Terra 20 Events
