As football fans worldwide keep their eyes trained on Brazil, ESA’s Proba-V minisatellite captures the entire country in a single image.
The Andean Plateau, or Altiplano, of neighboring Bolivia, including Lake Titicaca and the giant Salar Uyuni salt flat, are visible towards the scene’s western edge.
Proba is smaller than a cubic meter but its view spans a mighty 2250 km. It reveals details 300 m across but the central part of the image is sharper – down to 100 m – as demonstrated in the right-hand image, which shows a detail of the River Negro joining the mighty River Amazon.
Proba-V is a miniaturized ESA satellite tasked with a full-scale mission: to map land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days.
The camera’s continent-spanning field of view collects light in the blue, red, near-infrared and mid-infrared wavebands, ideal for monitoring plant and forest growth as well as inland water bodies.
Proba’s images are processed and distributed to hundreds of scientific end users by VITO, Belgium’s Flemish Institute for Technological Research, extending the coverage of previous generations of the Vegetation camera flown on the Spot-4 and Spot-5 satellites.
Image credit: ESA/BELSPO
This radar image is one of the first from the Sentinel-1A satellite, acquired on 20 April – less than three weeks after its launch on 3 April.
The image shows the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, which is the largest salt flat in the world.
Occupying over 10,000 sq km, the vast Salar de Uyuni lies at the southern end of the Altiplano, a high plain of inland drainage in the central Andes. Some 40,000 years ago, this area was part of a giant prehistoric lake that dried out, leaving behind the salt flat.
While the salt flat appears an almost homogenous white in optical satellite imagery, here we see it in shades of grey, and it looks almost like a lake. This has to do with how the radar signal reacts to different surfaces: areas where the radar signal is absorbed appear darker, while areas where the signal is reflected back to the satellite appear lighter. This gives Earth observation experts an indication of how rough or smooth the surfaces area, differences in salt density or even the presence of water.
But on the whole, the Salar de Uyuni is very flat, with a surface elevation variation of less than 1 m. This makes the area ideal for calibrating satellite radar altimeters – a different kind of radar instrument that measures surface topography. The future Sentinel-3 mission will carry a radar altimeter.
The surrounding terrain is rough in comparison to the vast salt flat and is dominated by the volcanoes of the Andes mountains forming part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
Sentinel-1A is the first in the two-satellite Sentinel-1 mission for Europe’s Copernicus program. Its radar data will be used for a variety of applications, including the surveillance of the marine environment, monitoring land-surface for motion risks, mapping for forest, water and soil management, and mapping to support humanitarian aid and crisis situations.
This image is featured on the Earth from Space video program.
Image credit: ESA
An unusual view of South America and the Andes mountains, acquired by Proba-V on 23 April 2014.
Image credit: ESA/VITO
Extremely heavy seasonal rains have fallen on northern Bolivia since October 2013. Resulting floods have affected as many as 150,000 inhabitants, and threatened around 100,000 head of cattle. The worst affected province is Beni in the northeastern part of the country. In this image, acquired February 25, 2014, by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft, vegetation is red, clouds are white, and flooded areas are grey-brown. The image covers an area of 21 by 22 miles (34 by 35 kilometers) and is located near 14 degrees south, 66.5 degrees west.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
The river-delineated border between western Brazil's Acre province (upper left), and northwestern Bolivia's Pando Department (lower right), demarcates a remarkable difference in land use and development practices. Brazil has opened up this part of the rain forest to farming and settlement, producing the herringbone pattern of forest cutting. This part of Bolivia, on the other hand, preserves its native rain forest, untouched by development. The image was acquired July 2, 2008, covers an area of 42 by 45 km, and is located at 10.3 degrees south latitude, 67.2 degrees west longitude.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
