NASA asked people from all over the world on Earth Day this year one simple questions: "Where are you on Earth right now?"
They asked people to respond on special media with a selfie, with the goal of using each picture as a pixel in the creation of a "Global Selfie" mosaic image that would look like Earth appeared from space on Earth Day, according to a NASA press release.
"With the Global Selfie, NASA used crowd-sourced digital imagery to illustrate a different aspect of Earth than has been measured from satellites for decades: a mosaic of faces from around the globe," said Peg Luce, deputy director of the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington, according to the release.
A zoomable 3.2-gigapixel image that people can scan and explore was released a little over a month after Earth Day.
NASA received over 36,422 individual photos that were posted on social media and tagged #globalselfie on or around April 22, 2014.
"People on every continent - 113 countries and regions in all - posted selfies," NASA said regarding the Global Selfie. "From Antarctica to Yemen, Greenland to Guatemala, Micronesia to the Maldives, Pakistan, Poland, Peru - and on. The image was assembled after weeks of curating more than 50,000 #globalselfie submissions - not all were accessible or usable - from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr."
The mosaic is hosted by GigaPan. Click here to view it.
"We were overwhelmed to see people participate from so many countries. We're very grateful that people took the time to celebrate our home planet together, and we look forward to everyone doing their part to be good stewards of our precious Earth," said Luce.
The year 2014 is an important one for NASA Earth science, since for the first time in over a decade, five missions created to gather critical data about our planet will be launched into space in a single year.
The first mission, the Global Precipitation Measurement mission's Core Observatory, launched in February. Next is the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), which will launch from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on July 1.
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