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NASA celebrates Earth's splendid beauty
Washington, April 22 Celebrating the Earth Day, NASA has released
some of the most gorgeous images and a stunning video of planet Earth as
captured from the International Space Station (ISS).
As part of its Earth Day programme, the US space agency is asking people for
videos, messages, Instagram pictures celebrating our world, with the hashtag
#NoPlaceLikeHome.
In the image gallery celebrating Earth Day, you can see a composite image of
southern Africa and the surrounding oceans to the tropical cyclone Joalane seen
over the Indian Ocean.
On April 5 this year, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)
on NASA's Terra satellite acquired a natural-colour image of sea ice off the
coast of East Antarctica's Princess Astrid Coast.
Next day, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly took a stunning photograph over Australia
and posted it to social media.
NASA's Terra satellite also captured the March 20 solar eclipse's shadow over
clouds in the Arctic Ocean.
From the ISS, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Barry Wilmore took a photograph of
the Great Lakes and central US on December 7 last year and posted it on social
media.
The NASA video features dramatic visual comparisons of parts of the Earth most
severely impacted by climate change, including the Aral sea visibly shrinking
between 2000 and 2014.
It also features photographs of areas impacted by extreme weather, such as
partially submerged islands in Bermuda.
"Every day of every year, NASA satellites provide useful data about our
home planet, and along the way, some beautiful images as well," NASA
posted in the video.
The clip was released on the "Earth Day" as NASA plans to focus
attention on "exploring" our home planet -- the most
"complex" of the 1,800 planets discovered in our cosmos so far.
It is this complexity that challenges the Earth scientists as they seek to
figure out how the whole planet works as a system.
"Earth has oceans, forests, deserts, ice sheets, rain, snow, an
atmosphere. And we have life. These are some of the things that NASA's 20
Earth-orbiting missions observe and measure in our quest to build the most
complete understanding possible of our dynamic planet," the US space
agency said.
The space agency has a Facebook page dedicated to the #NoPlaceLikeHome project
and also provides full coverage on its redesigned web site.