That familiar image of a bright blue globe that greets you when you power up your iPhone actually has a story behind it. Dubbed the “Blue Marble,” the photo is a composite of thousands of images taken over the years, starting with the first in 1972 from Apollo 17.
Robert Simmon, a data visualizer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team of engineers sort through 1.7 terabytes of information downloaded from orbiting satellites daily. To put that in perspective, that’s enough information to fill about 3,000 CDs, all from which the NASA team has to dig through and turn out images.
Robert Simmon, a data visualizer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team of engineers sort through 1.7 terabytes of information downloaded from orbiting satellites daily. To put that in perspective, that’s enough information to fill about 3,000 CDs, all from which the NASA team has to dig through and turn out images.
The first computer-generated Blue Marble was completed in 2002, after 30 years of downloaded satellite data. But it was Apple’s usage of the photo that made it truly famous.
“The summer of 2007, I bought one of the first iPhones. At that time, you had to plug the iPhone into your computer to set it up,” Simmon recalls. “Literally the first thing that came up was screen with the Blue Marble.”
Since then, the team has released several updated, higher-quality images with a scale of roughly one kilometer per pixel. The latest Blue Marble, which came out in 2012, is a composite of the Western Hemisphere. The satellite that pulled the data orbited the planet six times over the course of 8 hours (not including the time it took engineers to crunch the data).
Source via Mashable
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