NASA offers to virtually adopt a piece of Earth

April 22, 2017 around the world will celebrate Earth Day - an event designed to encourage people to be more attentive to the fragile and vulnerable environment on planet Earth. Last year, 120 countries of the world signed the Paris Agreement in the stamps of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which regulates measures to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 2020. This may be naive, but there is hope that the coordinated efforts of states will eventually stop heating the planet.

This year, NASA has joined Earth Day 2017 events. The agency invites all citizens of the world to take part in a touching action - and virtually “adopt” one of the 64,000 pieces of our planet , take patronage over it.

The study of the Earth is the main scientific task facing NASA. Conquest of the outer reaches of space, the study of the Sun, Moon, Mars and other space bodies - these are already minor tasks.
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“NASA is continuing to search and research the planets in our solar system and beyond, but no planet has been studied better than the one we live in,” says a press release . “Our fleet of 18 scientific space missions to study the Earth, with the support of airplanes, ships, and ground-based observations, measures the environmental aspects that affect the lives of everyone around the world.”

In the framework of the popular science project Adopt The Planet, each participant can “adopt” a small piece of Earth measuring approximately 80 × 80 km. Choose a piece at will not work - it remains to rely on the will of the lot. And do not be upset if you got a lifeless penny near Antarctica, because on our home planet every corner is precious.



The participant receives a personal certificate of adoption of a piece of Earth, it can be printed or published in social media.

Together with the site of the planet you are transferred scientific data about him, collected in the framework of NASA research projects. For example, the certificate at the top shows:

• Sea ice amount ( Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument from Terra and Aqua satellites);
  
  
• The brightness temperature, which characterizes the intensity of radiation and shows how much energy is reflected from clouds, earth and water and other objects. The brightness temperature measurement is performed by the same MODIS spectroradiometer;
  
  
• Corrected reflection (corrected reflectance), the picture is composed of different parts of the spectrum: the visible part of the spectrum is Band 3 (shown in red), short-wave infrared Band 6 and Band 7 (green and blue);
  
  
• Night-time shooting (nighttime imagery), performed with the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) tool installed on a NASA-NOAA satellite of the Suomi NPP .

For other sites, the certificate may reflect other data collected by NASA, including carbon monoxide (CO) in the atmosphere, chlorophyll concentration in the ocean, cloud height, vegetation density - vegetative index, soil moisture in the root zone (Root Zone Soil Moisture), altitude, ozone concentration at an altitude of 20 km, relative humidity at an altitude of 1.5 km, ocean surface temperature, snow cover.



From the personal certificate on the coordinates of your part of the planet, you can go to the Worldview website, which visualizes information from the Earth Observing Earth Observing Data System and Information System (EOSDIS). There, almost in real time (with updating every three hours) data of scientific observations of NASA are collected.

NASA expects that until April 22, earthlings will dismantle for adoption all 64,000 available fragments of the Earth. If this happens earlier, then nothing terrible: the distribution will start from the very beginning for the second time, so that no one will be left without a piece. Judging by the number of fragments issued at the moment (about 62,000), by the Earth Day each piece of the planet will have several adoptive parents at once.