GEOGRAPHY REALM - The Northwest Passage connects ship traffic through the Arctic Ocean to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean. The passage winds through a cluster of islands north of mainland Canada, offering a potentially shorter route between oceans but posing significant challenges due to the unpredictable Arctic waters and shifting ice.

SciTechDaily - On July 13, 2024, the OCI (Ocean Color Instrument) aboard NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) satellite captured a rare, mostly cloud-free image of the islands and waterways that form the crux of the Northwest Passage.

Remote sensing is the science of looking at objects from a distance. Applying the concept to satellites, we can look at any number of objects from space. NASA’s PACE mission takes advantage of this – it is a satellite whose goal is to look at the Earth from space and help scientists answer a broad range of scientific questions. Join Skye Caplan, a remote sensing scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, to learn about the PACE mission as well as the long history NASA has of Earth observations. This was recorded on July 18, 2024.

Living on Earth - A powerful new NASA satellite called PACE can look at the ocean and clouds to distinguish between different kinds of microscopic phytoplankton and aerosols from an orbit 400 miles up. PACE Project Scientist Dr. Jeremy Werdell joins Host Jenni Doering to describe how the technology works, its value to scientific research on climate change, and the real-time data it provides about water and air quality worldwide.