Wavelengths - Blog Posts

Earth’s Hot and It’s Cold 🎶(and We Can Tell from Space)

From people and pets to pens and pencils, everything gives off energy in the form of heat. We’ve got special instruments that measure thermal wavelengths, so we can tell whether something is hot, cold or in between. Hotter things emit more thermal energy; colder ones emit less.

We have special instruments in space, zipping around Earth and measuring the hottest and coldest places on our planet.

We can also measure much subtler changes in heat – like when plants cool down as they take up water from the soil and ‘sweat’ it out into the air, in a process called evapotranspiration.

This lets us identify healthy, growing crops around the world.

The instrument that can do all this is called the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2 (TIRS-2). It just passed a series of rigorous tests at our Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., proving it’s ready to survive in space.

TIRS-2 is bound for the Landsat 9 satellite, which will continue decades of work studying our planet from space.

 Learn more about TIRS-2 and how we see heat from space: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/new-landsat-infrared-instrument-ships-from-nasa/.

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Cascading loops on the surface of the sun highlight an active region that had just rotated into view of our solar-observing spacecraft. We have observed this phenomenon numerous times, but this one was one of the longest and clearest sequences we have seen in years. 

The bright loops are actually charged particles spinning along the magnetic field lines! The action was captured in a combination of two wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light over a period of about 20 hours. 

Take a closer look: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/potw/item/798

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