Three NASA pictures of Earth

Say NASA and most people picture a nebula, or a boot on gray dust. The agency also spends a lot of its time looking down. Satellites watch ice and weather. People at Kennedy Space Center photograph the ground around the launch site. The three pictures here never leave Earth.

Khurdopin Glacier

Khurdopin is a glacier in the Karakoram, in northern Pakistan. For about twenty years it barely moved. In October 2016 it surged. By March 2017 the ice had dammed the Shimshal River, a lake formed behind it, and the river cut its own way out through the glacier before that lake could break.

The view is from ASTER, a camera on the Terra satellite, built with partners in Japan. The frames were taken on August 20, 2015 and May 21, 2017, and NASA released the picture in 2018. From above, the ice runs between brown ridges like a river, pale in some stretches and dark with debris in others. The credit that goes with it is NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

Mount Unzen, from Atlantis

During the STS-44 flight, November 24 to December 1, 1991, the shuttle Atlantis was about 200 nautical miles up. A photograph from the crew puts the tail and the payload bay in the foreground, and the curve of the Pacific below them. In that weather, a plume from Mount Unzen, on the Japanese island of Kyushu, trails off a bank of cloud. Islands south of Korea have pulled the air into long chains of swirls. A faint veil of dust from Mongolia sits on the horizon.

A bee at Kennedy

On May 19, 2023, NASA photographer Franki Michaux was in a field at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The picture is a close one: a bee on green, spiky flower heads, with a few small pale purple flowers soft in the background. Kennedy shares that land with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. More than 330 native and migratory bird species live there, along with 65 kinds of amphibians and reptiles. The launch pads are only a piece of the ground.

Using the photographs

In the United States, a photograph made by a NASA employee as part of the job has no copyright. The public already paid for the work. You can download the shuttle picture and the Kennedy picture for a personal project or a commercial one, without asking first. Don’t suggest that NASA endorses what you made.

Two limits are worth keeping. The NASA meatball and the NASA worm are logos, and they are not yours to put on a product. The glacier picture is a joint project, so leave the Japanese partners in the credit. Other files in the wider NASA library were made by contractors or by another space agency, and those can come with their own terms.