10 NASA Images That Will Inspire You
The next time you hear the term "visionary" applied to business leadership, think about what NASA has been doing for years. Images from NASA's satellites and spacecraft show technology at its most inspiring.
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The ubiquity of digital cameras makes it easy to overlook the glory of the visible world. Facebook in 2013 said users had uploaded more than 250 billion photos, and were adding 350 million photos per day. And that doesn't include photos uploaded through Instagram, or photos stored elsewhere, to say nothing of videos.
We have so many images that we don't have time to view them all. Such abundance obscures the meaningful moments we capture amid all the unremarkable snapshots of friends, food, and fingers that couldn't stay out of the way of the lens.
Photo-sharing services can help separate the best from the banal, but so, too, can ambition.
NASA shoots for the stars, and the images it captures offer inspiration, instruction, and scientific enlightenment. The agency describes its vision thus: "To reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind."
The late Steve Jobs described Apple's philosophy back in 2011: "Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing."
NASA shows us that technology married with the common goals of humanity -- tending to our well-being, our environment, and our society while advancing the knowledge necessary to do so -- can accomplish the same thing.
Few images demonstrate that as well as the picture of Earth taken during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. The "Blue Marble" photo was the first photo of the entire round Earth from space ("Earthrise" taken during 1968's Apollo 8 mission offered a partial view of the Earth). It's considered to be one of the most widely seen photos in history, and it has been credited with amplifying the environmental awareness emerging at the time of its publication.
A NASA camera on NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite provided a similarly inspiring picture this week: An image of the moon passing in front of the Earth, taken from a million miles away. It's a viewpoint seldom seen, one that highlights the difference between our lush planet and its barren moon.
NASA's satellite imagery isn't only a visual record of technical achievement. It's valuable visual data that can be enriched with data from non-visual sensors. The photo informs the graph, the artful presentation of data about our world and other worlds. NASA's pictures can make your heart sing.
The next time you hear the term "visionary" applied to business leadership, think about what NASA has been doing for years. Technology alone is not enough. It must be joined with human aspirations.
The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite captured this image of Typhoon Soudelor off the coast of Okinawa, Japan, on Aug. 6. With a 3D rendering of radar data, forecasters can see where the storm is strongest.
Andrey Savtchenko at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues analyzed years of satellite data and weather model analysis to determine that California accumulated a debt of roughly 20 inches of rain between 2012 and 2015. With any luck, a strong El Nino weather system this winter will help pay what's owed.
The NASA spacecraft New Horizons passed by Pluto last month and snapped this picture of the dwarf planet. This is the first time anyone on Earth has seen Pluto up close.
Volcanos pump gases that affect our climate into our atmosphere. NASA and others have been trying to understand that process. The International Space Station provided the platform to take this shot of the Sarychev volcano in the Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan, back in 2009.
Musician Thomas Dolby released a song in 1982 that began "One of our submarines is missing tonight." Were NASA to issue a remix in conjunction with this graphic, it might open with the line "Some of our Arctic ice is missing today." The yellow area, overlaid with the extent of the ice on February 25, 2015, indicates the average maximum sea ice concentration from 1979 to 2014.
You've perhaps heard of a blue moon, the second full moon in the calendar month. We just witnessed one on July 31. Now, NASA has given us a blue sun. On July 15, NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory Ahead (STEREO-A) spacecraft captured this image using ultraviolet imaging equipment.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope continues to produce astonishing images. This shot of the Lagoon Nebula, in the constellation of Sagittarius, may not quite match the famed "Pillars of Creation," but it's still inspiring.
Having eyes in the skies offers insight into what's happening in our backyards. This image from NASA's Aqua satellite shows the extent of California's wildfires in a way not captured by news footage.
Sometimes a chart works better than a photograph. This chart, depicting the depletion of groundwater supplies, comes from data acquired by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.
Sometimes a chart works better than a photograph. This chart, depicting the depletion of groundwater supplies, comes from data acquired by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.
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