Downtown Houston from Space Station Alpha

Downtown Houston from Space Station Alpha

A series of digital photographs of Houston illustrates the new detail being obtained for cities around the world by crewmembers on the International Space Station. This image, captured on 17 December 2000 centers on the downtown region and shows extensive detail of streets, parks and major buildings. The retractable roof of the new Astros baseball stadium, Enron Field, is open. The spatial resolution of the image is about 6.7 m/pixel.

Photography of cities to monitor urban growth is one of the objectives of NASA’s Crew Earth Observations payload from the International Space Station. Other astronaut photographs of cities around the world can be viewed at the Cities from Space link from the NASA-JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

Image ISS001-E-6283 was provided by the Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory at Johnson Space Center. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA-JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth