beautiful it's a perspective that's
thrilled astronauts escape everyone else
peaceful and for over 25 years crunches
look back and wonder from this unique
vantage point generating a variety of
earth imagery produced with motion
picture and still cameras as well as the
shuttles onboard video system these
images provide a visual record of how
our planet is changing over time and
along with satellite data offer
scientists in a number of disciplines is
when you hook and research tool
oceanographers can look at currents from
the right position with respect to Sun a
detailed cloud patterns are captured for
meteorologists and geologists can see
large areas with very high photographic
resolution this is a almost vertical
shot of San Francisco as we look down
you can very easily see the fault line
so from a geological standpoint this is
a very very good photograph the Sun
angle is fairly low and you can see
exactly where the major minor faults are
in the San Francisco area astronauts
begin training in earth observations
when they entered the space program so
that by the time they fly they are
thoroughly familiar with the science and
photographic techniques involved in the
effort this enables them to make
real-time decisions about things from
orbit including the shattering phenomena
the original flight plan all those
events that there cannot be predicted
engines they just happen it is nice to
have a crew set of humanized 22 direct
cameras and instrumentation to those
sites in a very rapid response and
that's the value of the human being
earth observations from the shuttle
revealed dramatic changes on the face of
our planet
this is a view of Lake Chad and
Mauritania seen over the nose of a
Gemini spacecraft back in 1966 shuttle
crews flying over central Africa in the
nineteen eighty-five timeframe saw like
Chad looking like this the only
remaining water in the lake is that
light gray patch at the upper end of the
dark zone the SU courses simultaneous
with the extensive drought conditions in
central Africa that underlies those very
pointed human stories that we read about
the fragility of our atmosphere has
struck all earth-observing astronauts
you see how very very thin a little
coating it is compared to the rest of
the signs of the planet it's not like
the peel on a grapefruit or the peel on
an orange it's not even really like to
me the shell on an egg for relative
sizes if anything it's almost as if
we're covered by that thin little
membrane between the egg shell and the
egg itself that's the tiny little
membrane of air and gases that keeps us
all healthy a major environmental
concern today is the large field burning
and subsequent deforestation going on
around the world a number of shuttle
crews have documented this activity
intent is to recognize that there really
are no sovereign boundaries in our
environment but that everyone mankind as
a whole is affected by everything that
each one of us do
you