NASA Releases 2.95 Million Images

You may have visited these places and you may have flown over them and looked at them from the plane but it's not often you get to see images like this.

As of April 1st 2.95 million images were made available to the public that were taken by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument sitting aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft.

Here are some of our favourite images:

We've been to Venice but never quite seen it like this.

 

In 2002 the Hayman Fire became the largest wildfire in Colorado history:

 

The Kondyor Massif in Russia is a perfectly circular intrusion about 8km in diameter.

 

The McMurdo dry valleys in Antarctica may be the most Mars like landscapes on our planet.

 

The escondida mine in Chile's Atacama desert has transformed the landscape to extract precious metals like gold, silver and copper.

 

A fire burned out of control for 3 weeks at the Al-Mishraq sulfur plant in Iran.  At its height, the fire was putting 21,000 tonnes of sulfur dioxide a day into the atmosphere.

 

The Oresund Bridge runs nearly 8 kilometres (5 miles) from the Swedish coast to the artificial island of Peberholm in the middle of the Oresund strait. The crossing to Denmark is completed by the 4 km (2.5-mile) Drogden Tunnel from Peberholm to the Danish island of Amager.

 

Two thirds of the Netherlands is vulnerable to flooding.  Here you can see the dike system put in place in an attempt to prevent that.

 

Manaus is the biggest city in the state of Amazonas in Brazil.  Or better known as where England lost meekly to Italy 2-1 in the 2014 World Cup.

 

The Mexico border is starkly defined by the landscape.  Here the farms are coloured in red which highlights southern California compared to it's southern neighbours.

 

The Great Blue Hole in Belize is a giant sinkhole over 300m deep.

 

ASTER tracks the size of glaciers.  Here's the Malaspina glacier in Alaska.  The ice is in blue and the vegetation in yellow.

 

And finally we'll finish with one of our favourite places, Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

 

You can view more images on the ASTER website.