Satellites have become integral to our daily lives—such things as telephone, television, internet, weather forecasts, and gps tracking just to name a few. The Webb Space Telescope allows us to see billions of light years into the vastness of space. And we can't disregard things long forgotten and/or overlooked.
Phytoplankton Blooms
It's kind of bizarre to think that some of the smallest
living things on Earth can make a display that you can see from space. In
August of 2012, NASA's Aqua satellite captured some remarkable images of a
massive phytoplankton bloom surrounding Russia's Novaya Zemla island. These particular
plankton contain plates of a calcium-containing mineral that give them a bright
blue color, and when they gather in massive numbers they make an incredible
visual image. Temperature and salinity conditions have to be absolutely right
to trigger this phenomenon, so capturing it this clearly is pretty amazing.
Hundreds Of Sunken
Ships
Much of the ocean is resistant to satellite photography
because we don't have cameras powerful enough to penetrate those depths from
space. However, there are still amazing things to be seen in the shallows, such
as the ghost fleet of Mallows Bay. At the start of World War I, the United
States needed to quickly build transport vessels. In April of 1917, 1000 ships
were ordered to be built. By the end of the war, the boats had become obsolete
and eventually they were sunk to the bottom of the Potomac River at Mallows
Bay. From space, the ship graveyard is a striking and amazing sight.
A Marijuana Farm
If you're doing something illegal, it used to be sufficient to put up a fence and keep prying eyes out. But when the eyes are in the sky, things change. Spotting marijuana growths from small planes has been common practice for quite a while. But the owners of a massive marijuana growing operation in Switzerland found that out the hard way in 2010 when Google Earth satellite images revealed their pot fields. Police in Zurich discovered the two-acre field by chance while looking up the address of area farmers, and quickly moved in for the bust. Sixteen people were arrested and over a ton of marijuana was impounded.
Kazakh Geoglyphs
The people of the ancient world did some things that still confound us today. One of the most perplexing is the practice of creating geoglyphs—massive drawings in the earth that are too large to be comprehended from the ground, but show up clear as day from high above. The Nazca lines of southern Peru are the most famous. In 2014 archaeologists happened across a completely new set of geoglyphs in Kazakhstan. The drawings, which depict a number of different geometric shapes, have yet to be explained.
A Hidden Rainforest
It's well-known that the truly wild areas of the planet are
dying at a rapid rate, but satellite imagery can often reveal hidden oases that
mankind hasn't managed to ruin…yet. That happened in 2005, when scientists at
the Royal Botanic Gardens were going over Google Earth images from Mozambique.
At the top of Mount Mabu, isolated by steep slopes, was one of the largest
untouched rainforests that scientists had ever seen. Villagers had used the
site to hide from the civil war that rocked the nation, but aside from that it
was on no map and not recognized by the government. Three years later, an
expedition found previously undiscovered plants and animals there.
Lost Egyptian Pyramids
One of the most frustrating parts of the archaeologist's
craft is having to guess about ancient civilizations buried beneath the
surface. Egypt, with its constantly-shifting sands, is especially tough.
Thankfully, satellites equipped with infrared cameras have changed the game
completely. In a 2011 survey of the country, heat-sensing photography was used
to reveal the shapes of seventeen lost pyramids, as well as thousands of other
buildings buried beneath the desert.
A Methane Hotspot
Satellites don't just take photos of things we can see with
the naked eye. Their advanced sensors allow them to record wavelengths we can't
perceive. That's how we found an enormous packet of the greenhouse gas methane
hovering over the American southwest. The Four Corners area, where Arizona, New
Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet, is a hotbed of natural gas extraction.
Scientists believe that the methane was released as a side effect of that
industry, and claim that it's equivalent to the entire greenhouse gas output of
Sweden.
A Meteor Crater
One of the coolest things about satellite surveillance is
that it allows us to see things that would be virtually invisible from the
ground. Case in point: the crater from one of Earth's most recent meteor
impacts, a scant 5,000 years ago. Measuring just 150 feet wide, this tiny hole
in Egypt was first noticed in 2008. But it wasn't until a team analyzed Google
Earth images in 2010 that they realized what makes it unusual. The site is
what's known as a "rayed crater," featuring lines of lighter-colored
rock emanating from the impact area. These craters are common on the Moon but
typically eradicated by erosion on Earth, so it's an advantage to science to
find a new one.
One of the most fascinating discoveries in the history of
paleontology—a completely new hominid species that fills in information about
the evolution of Homo sapiens. In 2007, South African professor Lee
Berger was using Google Earth to examine caves around the so-called
"Cradle of Humanity" area of South Africa when he started to notice a
pattern. Following it out, he marked 500 other sites that he thought had the
potential to produce fossils. The next year, he started to explore them on
foot, and one gave up an incredible find: the first bones of Australopithecus
sediba, a species that some believe might be the missing link between man
and ape.
A Mars Lander
Let's look away from Earth and cast our attention to our nearest planetary neighbor for a look at a mission gone wrong. In 2003, the European Space Agency launched a mission to Mars that involved landing an unmanned craft called the Beagle 2 to take samples and return data. Unfortunately, after launch the ESA lost contact with the Beagle and it vanished into space. A dozen years later, NASA staff operating the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's cameras spotted an anomaly on the planet's surface. Upon investigation, they realized they had found the long-missing Beagle 2. The craft's solar panels had failed to open, resulting in mission failure, but it's been sitting on Mars this whole time.
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