Credit: NASA/JPL
Want to take part in a worldwide celebration of this year’s Earth Day?
NASA is inviting all passengers on our planet to take part in a “Global Selfie” event.
For Earth Day – celebrated on April 22 – NASA is trying to create an image of Earth from the ground up while also fostering a collection of portraits of the people of Earth.
The call is for participants to get outside, be it with mountains, parks, the sky, rivers, lakes — wherever you are — and produce a selfie. You’ll need to describe where you are via a sign, words written in the sand, spelled out with rocks — or by using printable signs that NASA officials have created that are available at a special webpage.
The #GlobalSelfie sign is available in several languages.
Crowd-sourced collection
NASA will be monitoring photos posted to five social media sites: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr.
Your selfie would then be posted to social media using the hashtag #GlobalSelfie.
The Earth mosaic image itself and a video using the images will be put together and released in May.
“On this Earth Day, we wanted to create a different picture of our planet — a crowd-sourced collection of snapshots of the people of Earth that we could use to create one unique mosaic of the Blue Marble,” according to a NASA website.
Big year for Earth science
For NASA itself, 2014 is being viewed as a big year for Earth science.
There are five Earth-observing missions that will be launched – more than NASA has conducted in a single year in over a decade, kicked off on Feb. 27 by the lofting of the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan.
It would be joined by the Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite; Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2; the International Space Station-RapidScat instrument; and the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System, or CATS, instrument.
Want to take part?
Check out the special website to take part in the Global Selfie program:
http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/globalselfie/
By Leonard David