From 400 km above Earth ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst took this picture of South America as the International Space Station flew by at 28 800 km/h.
The orbital outpost flies over the planet between latitudes 52ºN/S, reaching from the tip of South America to the UK.
An unusual view of South America and the Andes mountains, acquired by Proba-V on 23 April 2014.
On October 9, NASA's Juno spacecraft flew past Earth, using our home planet's gravity to get the final boost it needed to reach Jupiter. The JunoCam instrument captured this monochrome view of Earth, and other instruments were tested to ensure they work as designed during a close planetary encounter.
The Juno spacecraft was launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 5, 2011. Juno's rocket, the Atlas 551, was only capable of giving Juno enough energy or speed to reach the asteroid belt, at which point the Sun's gravity pulled Juno back toward the inner solar system. The Earth flyby gravity assist put Juno on course for arrival at Jupiter on July 4, 2016.
The Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC) is a large layered igneous intrusion within the earth's crust, exposed at the edge of the Transvaal Basin in South Africa. The complex contains the world's largest reserves of the platinum group metals, platinum, palladium, osmium, indium, rhodium and rhenium, along with vast quantities of iron, tin, chromium, titanium and vanadium. Numerous mines, tailings piles, and leach ponds are shown in blue in the ASTER image. The image was acquired October 24, 2006, covers an area of 38 by 52 km, and is located at 25.6 degrees south latitude, 27.4 degrees east longitude.
The southern Atacama Desert is pictured in this Envisat image, with the border of Chile (west) and Argentina (east) running down the middle. The Atacama is believed to be the driest desert in the world, and the lack of cloud cover in this image highlights the dry climate.
This image was acquired by Envisat’s MERIS instrument on 4 March 2012.
A 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed 'Suomi NPP' on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.
Suomi NPP is NASA's next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.
Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.
