Earth
Your home. Our mission.
NASA is an exploration agency, and one of our missions is to know our home. We develop novel tools and techniques for understanding how our planet works -- for the benefit of humanity and for insights we need to explore other moons and planets. NASA's Earth Science Division operates more than 20 satellites in orbit, sponsors hundreds of research programs and studies, and funds opportunities to put data to use for societal needs. We develop new ways to observe the oceans, land cover, ice, atmosphere, and life, and we measure how changes in one drive changes in others over the short and long term. While listening to and collaborating with industry leaders, international partners, academic institutions, and other users of our data, we drive innovations and deliver science to help inform decisions that benefit the nation and the world.
Recent News and Articles
Featured Story
Going With the Flow: Visualizing Ocean Currents with ECCO
NASA scientists and collaborators built the ECCO model to be the most realistic, detailed, and continuous depiction of the ocean ever developed. Read the story, watch the video, and look at the many new visualizations.
Read MoreScience in Action for Society
Learn how NASA’s studies of Earth bring benefits to the nation and world.
NASA Flights Map Critical Minerals from Skies Above Western US
NASA’s Brad Doorn Brings Farm Belt Wisdom to Space-Age Agriculture
NASA Helps Build New Federal Sea Level Rise Website
NASA Announces New System to Aid Disaster Response
Treasured Maps
Elevation data collected during a space shuttle mission in 2000 continues to inform science and society in unexpected ways.
OpenET Study Helps Water Managers and Farmers Put NASA Data to Work
Picturing Earth: Astronaut Photography In Focus
For 20 years, astronauts have been shooting photos of Earth from the space station. Like everything the astronauts do, they are trained for this job. And like everything they do, there is purpose and intention behind it.
Sensing the Seas
For more than forty years, NASA has found unique ways to study the surface layers of the ocean from the tropics to the poles. With three new missions since 2020 – PACE, SWOT, and Sentinel 6-Michael Freilich – we are now ushering in a new era of ocean studies.
NASA’s PACE, US-European SWOT Satellites Offer Combined Look at Ocean
NASA Analysis Shows Irreversible Sea Level Rise for Pacific Islands
NASA Project in Puerto Rico Trains Students in Marine Biology
Surfing NASA’s Internet of Animals: Satellites Study Ocean Wildlife
NASA Wants to Identify Phytoplankton Species from Space. Here’s Why.
Images of the Day
Fire Grows Unusually Large in Japan
Following a record dry month, a fire near Ofunato spread to become the country’s largest in decades.
Iceberg A-84 has spent part of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer zipping along West Antarctica’s coastline.
Nighttime lights reveal the structure of Turkmenistan’s capital city.
February 2025 was a scorcher, with record temperatures in parts of Brazil and notable heat in Argentina.
Cyclone Flurry in the Southern Hemisphere
An unusual number of tropical storms churned across the planet’s southern oceans simultaneously in February 2025.
Large Fire Footprint on Faraway Amsterdam Island
Wildfire burned through unique landscapes and disrupted scientific research on this remote island in the southern Indian Ocean.
Whorls of White off Greenland
Bright snow topped the island’s thick ice sheet, while a swirling display of sea ice hugged the southeast coast.
PACE Scientists Take to the Sea and Air (and Really High Air)
One of NASA’s most expansive and complex field campaigns took place over the month of September. The goal: to check the data that the new PACE satellite is collecting from orbit about Earth’s atmosphere and ocean. To do that, NASA’s PACE-PAX (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission Postlaunch Airborne eXperiment) deployed several aircraft and ships from multiple locations in California, including Marina, Santa Barbara, and NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards.
Earth Information Center
For more than 50 years, NASA satellites have provided data on Earth's land, water, air, temperature, and climate. NASA's Earth Information Center allows visitors to see how our planet is changing in six key areas: sea level rise and coastal impacts, health and air quality, wildfires, greenhouse gases, sustainable energy, and agriculture.
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