Lake Gairdner in central South Australia is pictured in this image acquired by Japan’s ALOS satellite on 1 December 2009.
The Lake Gairdner National Park – which includes the nearby lakes Everard and Harris – was established in 1991 for its significant wildlife habitat and natural features.
While the area is hot and dry in summer, spring brings water and is a popular destination for birdwatchers. Red and western grey kangaroos, emus and feral camels can also be seen here.
When flooded, Gairdner is one of the largest salt lakes in Australia, more than 160 km long and 48 km wide. But when dry, the vast salt pan attracts racers attempting to set land speed records and is the site for the annual Speed Week event.
This image shows mostly the dry, salt-crusted lakebed, while the islands appear brick-red.
Image credit: JAXA/ESA
This week’s satellite image was acquired over the eastern part of Mexico City.
The area pictured lies within central Mexico’s highlands plateau called the Valley of Mexico. This valley was originally covered by the waters of Lake Texcoco but over the centuries the water has been drained. The area that has not been built up is today used for hydraulic management and is made up of reservoirs and ponds such as the large, dark Nabor Carrillo lake pictured here.
The area receives more than 100,000 migratory birds each year that travel through the Central Migratory Flyway, and is a key resting, feeding and breeding ground for several species of shorebirds.
In contrast to the open space of the former Lake Texcoco, Mexico City is a densely populated metropolitan area (left and bottom).
We can see the runways of the international airport on the far left. South of the airport is the Alameda Oriente recreational park with its somewhat spiral artificial lake. North of the airport, El Bosque de San Juan de Aragón is another park and important green area.
City parks play a large role in the city’s effort to alleviate air pollution. In the early 1990s, pollution was believed to cause hundreds of deaths each year. Air quality has improved in recent decades through a series of government efforts to cut emissions.
This image, acquired by Korea’s Kompsat-2 satellite on 21 December 2012, is also featured on the Earth from Space video program.
Image credit: KARI/ESA
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
The freshwater Lake Constance in Central Europe is pictured in this image from the Sentinel-1A satellite.
Formed by the Rhine Glacier during the last Ice Age, it covers an area of about 540 sq km and is an important source of drinking water for southwestern Germany.
The lake has shorelines in three countries: Germany to the north, Switzerland to the south and Austria at its eastern end. Over the water body, however, there are no borders because there is no legally binding agreement on where they lie.
In the lower-right, we can see where the Rhine river flows into the lake from the south, which then flows out of the lake to the west (left). This and other rivers carry sediments from the Alps, extending the coastline and decreasing the lake’s water depth.
The runways of Germany’s Friedrichshafen Airport are visible in the right section of the image. The Aviation & Aerospace Museum is nearby.
This image was acquired on 10 May in ‘interferometric wide swath mode’ and in dual polarization.
The radar instrument gathers information in either horizontal or vertical radar pulses, and colors were assigned to the different types. In this image, buildings generally appear pink, while vegetation is green. Areas with lowest reflectivity in all polarizations appear very dark, like the water.
Sentinel-1A’s radar is still being calibrated following its 3 April 2014 launch, but early images like this give us a glimpse of the kind of operational imagery that this mission will provide for Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring program.
This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video program.
Image credit: ESA
Image of China’s Poyang lake from the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) on the Sentinel-1A satellite, acquired on 12 May 2014 in dual polarization. The radar gathers information in either horizontal or vertical polarizations, shown here as a composite (HH in red, HV in green and HH-HV in blue).
Poyang is just one of the many project areas of the collaborative Chinese-European Dragon Program, which marked its ten-year anniversary this week. Read more.
Image credit: ESA
