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Article: Zoom with a view: Mission to Planet Earth. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration program using remote sensing to diagnose problems with ecosystems)
- Article from:
- Current Events, a Weekly Reader publication
- Article date:
- April 1, 1991
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1991 Weekly Reader Corp. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Zoom with a View MISSION TO PLANET EARTH
In 1988, astronauts aboard the space shuttle looked down on South America and saw a 1,000-kilometer-long smoke cloud that covered the entire Amazon basin and was only stopped by the towering wall of the Andes mountains. The haze of smoke came from the burning of the Amazon rain forest, a region containing the world's greatest variety of plants and animals. That vast spread of smoke was clearly visible to the astronauts, who were in a unique position to see how and where humans are altering natural ecosystems on planet Earth.
That is precisely what scientists plan to learn by using space to take an inventory of ...