NEW YORK: A new weather satellite just beamed its first image of Earth back home, and it is beautiful. Europe’s MSG-4 satellite captured the colorful view of Earth from its position in geostationary orbit. The weather satellite’s new image of Earth, which shows the greens and browns of Africa and Europe, is the craft’s first image of the planet, released on August 4.
MSG-4 is currently in a six month commissioning phase of its mission after the craft launched to space on July 15.
Once MSG-4 finishes up its commissioning, it will be re-named Meteosat-11 and will hang out in space, in a sort of hibernation, until one of the other Meteosats needs to be replaced. It will become part of the third generation of these satellites starting in 2019.
This satellite is the most recent in a long line of MSG satellites designed to beam back images of Africa, Europe and parts of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans every 15 minutes, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). These high-quality images can then be used by meteorologists to predict the weather.
At the moment, four satellites of this kind — named Meteosat 7, 8, 9 and 10 — are currently beaming back data from geostationary orbit. Geostationary satellites stay in place over a specific point on Earth, enabling meteorologists to see a weather system evolve.
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