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by Teresa Martin

I liked the new Star Trek movie. This past week, we watched it in the best way possible for watching a space adventure - at a drive-in theatre in Wellfleet, with the stars overhead and fog fingerlets waving at the edges of the fence, where generations have watched movies before me.

Then I went home and dreamed of heroics in finding new worlds and woke up pondering how well we understand our own home planet. The FX of 2009 studio production overlaid on 1960s television innocence will do that do you.

All of which put me in the right frame of mind to celebrate a very special space birthday - the 10-year marker of the Earth Observatory.

The Earth Observatory is part of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) project. This project deploys a set of satellites that are designed for long-term observation of the land, biospheres, atmosphere, and oceans of Earth.

From their fly-over perspective the EOS satellites create images in ways that help us see our planet in different ways and, by collecting all this imagery over time, they show trends and changes in powerful visual ways.

The Earth Observatory's mission is pretty straightforward too: sharing these images with us - the general public. That translates into a lot of really cool photos of bits and pieces of our planet from space, best highlighted by Earth Observatory's Image of the Day:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/

Earth Observatory's public outreach has been underway for 10 years this year (Happy Birthday!) but the project itself is a descendant of the hey-day of the space race. Heck, it's even been around a bit longer than the Star Trek franchise!

The current crop of satellites had its genesis in a set of satellites first launched nearly 50 years ago, the low Earth orbit Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS-1) which launched on April 1, 1960. These were eventually replaced by the Landsat satellites of the 1970s, which in turn over the 1980s and 1990s evolved into EOS. EOS is now morphing into the Earth Systematic Missions (ESM) program ... and so space and time marches on.

EOS satellites are technically called a "series of coordinated polar-orbiting satellites." This means each one passes above or nearly above both poles of the earth every day and their movements are coordinated with each other so that taken together they create a snap shot of day in the life of the planet.

The EOS missions focus on a swath of earth features like radiation, clouds, water vapor, and precipitation, the oceans, greenhouse gases. land-surface hydrology and ecosystem processes, glaciers, sea ice, and ice sheets, ozone and stratospheric chemistry, and natural and anthropogenic aerosols. That last, by the way, is the fancy scientific way of saying 'the stuff that creates smog and haze."

From where we sit on the Earth's surface, from within the embracing arms of its life-sustaining atmosphere, and from our linear perspective, it is near impossible to see the dynamic breathing creature that is our planet. But from on high, from the orbital positions of these 'eyes in the sky' we can see ourselves and our world in a new way.

Flip through some of the recorded images and you begin to see the scope of the observatory. Here are the tiny mapped dots of human life covering Washington DC on this past Inaugural Day, over there is the spread of smoke from fires in Australia ... this image holds dust plumes over the Red Sea and on this one is remote sensing of an earthquake swarm in Yellowstone Park ... be it human presence, snow and ice, oceans, heat, or land, EOS helps us see and understand ourselves.

Sometimes we think of technology only as a tool to explore strange new worlds and to boldly go where no man has gone before, a la Star Trek. But just as often it is a tool helping us understand ourselves and maybe, just maybe, take care of our world a little better.

Happy 10th Earth Observatory. May you live long and prosper - and may we all keep using our human-made tools to understand humankind a little bit better.