The new, even more beautiful global view in Maps and Earth.

In 2002 NASA released the Blue Marble , a global image of the earth with a resolution of one kilometer per pixel, based on data from NASA’s MODIS instrument. Updated in 2005 to twice the resolution, it has remained the canonical globally-uniform picture of the earth for over a decade.

With the Blue Marble as inspiration, we used Google Earth Engine technology to mine hundreds of terabytes of data from the USGS’s and NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite. The result is a seamless, globally-consistent image of the entire planet with a resolution of 15 meters per pixel, far finer than is possible with MODIS data alone.

To get a feel for the difference, here’s a comparison of the Grand Canyon, first from the Blue Marble Next Generation (courtesy NASA’s Earth Observatory), and then in our new Landsat-based imagery.

The Grand Canyon, as seen by MODIS and by Landsat 7.





Castellón, Spain: One example Landsat 7 image, and the final combined image.





Northwestern South America: before and after.



