The Blue Marble from the new Suomi NPP satellite. Click for a larger version - more versions linked below. Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

Just have a look at this amazing image of us from one of our newest satellites!

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

 

Suomi NPP is NASA’s next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.

Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.

To read more about NASA’s Suomi NPP go to: http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html

Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

You can see other sized versions of this image here at full resolution, I’m putting this on my desktop for sure.