1 00:00:03,988 --> 00:00:09,678 For nearly 60 years, astronauts have been looking down at Earth from space. 2 00:00:09,678 --> 00:00:13,790 And all along, they have been shooting photos. 3 00:00:13,790 --> 00:00:21,812 They have been doing so almost daily since November 2000, when the International Space Station became a permanent home to astronauts. 4 00:00:21,812 --> 00:00:26,545 We're over 3 million images in the archive. 5 00:00:26,545 --> 00:00:32,348 It is perhaps the longest continuous remote sensing record that we have for the Earth's surface. 6 00:00:35,275 --> 00:00:44,436 Like everything the astronauts do, they are trained for this job -- to look at our planet and chronicle what they see. 7 00:00:44,436 --> 00:00:50,730 They don't look at Earth and take photos just for the novelty, though there is definitely beauty, joy, and inspiration in it. 8 00:00:51,792 --> 00:00:58,073 So it's not just for fun and make them feel comfortable. There's real use to it. 9 00:01:00,728 --> 00:01:06,903 Space can be disorienting. So the astronauts are trained to orient themselves to their planet as they float above it. 10 00:01:09,721 --> 00:01:13,945 In their first days in orbit, very little of what they see looks familiar. 11 00:01:13,945 --> 00:01:17,274 Knowing how to look at Earth can help them connect to home. 12 00:01:17,778 --> 00:01:20,437 Most people don’t have a mental geography of any other place. 13 00:01:20,437 --> 00:01:29,258 I think it makes the world more manageable mentally so that they don't feel as though it's just overwhelmingly big. 14 00:01:29,816 --> 00:01:31,759 Crews really like looking at the Earth. 15 00:01:31,759 --> 00:01:39,208 There have been studies done in the past that it provides an actual psychological benefit for them, to be tied back to their home planet. 16 00:01:39,938 --> 00:01:43,859 An astronaut with a camera is also useful to science and society. 17 00:01:43,859 --> 00:01:51,000 He or she can pick out features of Earth or observe natural events and snap images that have real societal value. 18 00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:55,707 If the astronaut has any training at all, they recognize things that are out of the ordinary, 19 00:01:55,707 --> 00:01:57,979 and then they shoot it. 20 00:02:02,785 --> 00:02:08,870 Some events are caught by chance. Others are shot at the request of federal and international agencies. 21 00:02:10,626 --> 00:02:18,692 Folks on the ground would help me, when they knew, for example, weather or other events were taking place in the world, 22 00:02:18,692 --> 00:02:20,958 they would help me by giving me those targets. 23 00:02:20,958 --> 00:02:27,696 Say there's a storm here, or there's a fire there, or there's a volcano eruption over here. 24 00:02:28,241 --> 00:02:36,517 In August 2017, Tropical Storm Harvey rapidly intensified into a category four hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. 25 00:02:36,517 --> 00:02:43,311 It sat for days off the coast of Texas and dumped record amounts of rain, leading to devastating floods. 26 00:02:43,856 --> 00:02:50,580 With hurricane Harvey, we were able to document just the huge amounts of sediment outflow that came from that storm. 27 00:02:50,580 --> 00:02:56,527 Once the imagery is geo-referenced, then you can actually do measurements of what the extent of that sediment plume is. 28 00:02:56,527 --> 00:03:01,781 We try to impress upon that on the crews during their training too, that we're not just asking you to take pictures. 29 00:03:01,781 --> 00:03:07,620 This is actual science data that people are looking for, and we're supporting external science requests to get this data. 30 00:03:07,947 --> 00:03:13,827 It's a fundamentally different dataset than most polar orbiting satellites collect. 31 00:03:14,494 --> 00:03:17,734 An astronaut can view a place from different angles, 32 00:03:17,734 --> 00:03:19,555 different fields of view, 33 00:03:19,555 --> 00:03:21,090 different times of day, 34 00:03:21,090 --> 00:03:23,088 and different lighting conditions. 35 00:03:24,150 --> 00:03:28,886 They make real-time decisions about the best way to view events and places on Earth. 36 00:03:28,886 --> 00:03:34,930 The astronaut is doing the choosing ahead of the taking of the data, which is the exact opposite of what the satellites do. 37 00:03:34,930 --> 00:03:39,898 So you don't need to take nearly so many. You take a fraction of 1% of the images and you still see very interesting stuff. 38 00:03:41,205 --> 00:03:45,329 Of particular interest to scientists is how Earth changes over time. 39 00:03:46,840 --> 00:03:51,678 Since we've got over 50 years of manned space flight photography of Earth, 40 00:03:51,678 --> 00:03:55,457 you can look at certain areas and get a timeline of what's changed over time. 41 00:03:55,457 --> 00:03:58,056 like glaciers receding or growing. 42 00:03:58,056 --> 00:04:04,168 Or this is Lake Eyre and I've never seen it with water before. Here it's got water in it, bang, take the shot. 43 00:04:04,917 --> 00:04:08,276 The photos also spur new discoveries. 44 00:04:08,276 --> 00:04:13,909 Scientists have used astronaut photographs to better understand lightning and auroras. 45 00:04:13,909 --> 00:04:20,262 They have observed unusual atmospheric phenomena like sprites and polar mesospheric clouds. 46 00:04:20,262 --> 00:04:24,479 They have studied how city lights affect animal behavior. 47 00:04:24,479 --> 00:04:28,888 And they have discovered inland deltas and river deposits called megafans. 48 00:04:28,888 --> 00:04:34,377 Even in 1988, we thought we knew the dry surfaces of the planet. 49 00:04:34,377 --> 00:04:37,899 We didn't, at a mesoscale, at that that middling scale. 50 00:04:37,899 --> 00:04:43,849 This photography specifically gave me a worldview which I hadn't had before. 51 00:04:43,849 --> 00:04:49,294 And that was key to seeing that there are megafans around the planet. 52 00:04:50,601 --> 00:04:56,590 Beyond their value to science, the photos shot by astronauts remind us of the beauty and wonder of our planet. 53 00:04:57,393 --> 00:05:08,855 It's really a bottomless vault of riches that anybody now in the world can go and search through that vault and tap into those riches and do so much with it. 54 00:05:08,855 --> 00:05:13,203 There is also a somewhat more aesthetic component. 55 00:05:13,203 --> 00:05:18,281 Astronaut photographs of the Earth, they can look almost identical to an image you might take out of an airplane. 56 00:05:18,281 --> 00:05:22,115 Because of that, the data is immediately accessible to people. 57 00:05:22,809 --> 00:05:27,333 Astronaut photography is unique in that it's not just like a nadir-looking satellite image. 58 00:05:27,333 --> 00:05:31,045 It is a photo that someone picked up a camera and chose to take. 59 00:05:31,712 --> 00:05:41,942 Having that perspective of looking at Earth's horizon and seeing these really wide landscapes where you can literally view different climate zones all within a photo, 60 00:05:42,486 --> 00:05:46,782 I think puts into perspective how connected our world is. 61 00:05:49,736 --> 00:06:00,175 I think through capturing the imagery of all the different things on the surface of the Earth, all the phenomena that you can see from the vantage point, 62 00:06:00,175 --> 00:06:10,363 I think it just grew over time my appreciation for the uniqueness of Earth, for the resources that we find here, for what we've been able to do. 63 00:06:10,363 --> 00:06:19,409 It elevates a sense of responsibility to steward those things, to care about them a little bit more, to appreciate them.