Earth Day 2012 Video Contest Teaser

Released Wednesday, April 18, 2012

ID: 10963

The urge to explore seems equal with the urge to leave home behind. But at NASA, exploration also means looking back - looking at Earth, The Home Frontier.

From the agency's first television images of Earth from space, to the now iconic Apollo photographs of Earth, to Voyager's pale blue dot, NASA changed how we think about exploring Earth, and even how we are able to see Earth.

But that looking back provides far more than thought-provoking pictures. NASA's fleet of Earth-observing satellites orbits our planet multiple times each day, scanning the air, land, and seas for critical information about how our planet behaves and how it is changing. Computer-aided visualization of these otherwise invisible reams of dta continues to show us radical new ways of looking at our planet.