On Thursday, NASA released the latest photo of the planet Earth taken by the special instrument "VIIRS" (Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite) installed on the recently launched planetary observation satellite - Suomi NPPN. That photo has already been declared "the most beautiful high-resolution image of the Earth" so far. NASA named the image "Blue Marble 2012".
The image was created by combining data from the Suomi NPP satellite, unlike the original "Blue Marble" photograph, taken in 1972 by the Apollo 17 crew on their way to the Moon.
The Suomi NPP satellite collected the data for this image on January 4, from an altitude of 819 kilometers. That satellite circles the Earth 14 times in one day. Its goal is to collect data for meteorologists and climate change scientists.
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