# Blue Marble 2002

- By: NASA’s Terra satellite for the MODIS imageries, combined by Meow. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by…
- Date: 2002-02-11
- Classification: Photograph
- Credit line: NASA Visible Earth: Blue Marble: Land Surface, Shallow Water, and Shaded Topography
- Museum: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Marble_2002.png)
- Rights: Public domain
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/commons/thumb/2/23/Blue_Marble_2002.png/1920px-Blue_Marble_2002.png
- Who can see it: Kids profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public.

Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth. The land and coastal ocean portions of these images are based on surface observations collected from June through September 2001 and combined, or composited, every eight days to compensate for clouds that might block the sensor’s view of the surface on any single day.

Two different types of ocean data were used in these images: shallow water true color data, and global ocean color (or chlorophyll)…