Immerse yourself in the ‘Hyperwall’, NASA’s new visual showcase of a changing Earth

Famous astronomer Carl Sagan wrote that humanity has a responsibility to “preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we have ever known.”

Today, that quote is displayed in all its seriousness on a wall in NASA’s new Earth Information Center exhibition in the National Museum of Natural History. The Earth – the delicate sphere that Sagan described – is constantly evolving, and those changes are now visible in the form of data visualizations and graphics. On a series of walls and screens, satellite Observations reveal the state of our planet, from the loss of Arctic ice and sea level rise to the impacts of hurricanes, wildfires and floods.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a 10 meter long and 3.5 meter high screen, a so-called ‘Hyperwall’, which shows images of the Earth from space and on the ground, with informative images made from satellite data. The display provides an overview of the most pressing global environmental issues and illustrates how the Earth is affected by human activities, with real-time insights into the planet’s climate, weather, land and water.

Despite its far-reaching goals of sending humans back to the moon, exploring Mars and identifying exoplanets, NASA has studied one planet in our solar system far more than any other: Earth. Informed by more than 50 years of satellite data, the Earth Information Center at NASA Headquarters monitors local environmental conditions and planet-level changes. Climate and weather data are intended to inform federal and community policy and the decisions we make as people.

“NASA is a climate agency,” says NASA administrator Bill Nelson says in one statement. “With our fleet of more than 20 Earth observation satellites and instruments, NASA uses our unique vantage point in space to observe our planet and help people on the ground take action. … This new Earth Information Center at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History will bring NASA’s data to even more people.”

The Hyperwall not only displays the current state of the planet, but also shows short videos detailing how environmental research is being done around the world, made possible by satellites. One video highlights forest cover tracking work by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Forest Global Earth Observatory (BosGEO). As forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, these ground-based measurements can “help calibrate efforts to monitor carbon stores and sinks with space-based satellites,” thereby verifying the satellite observations.

Director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Joshua Tewksbury tells Smithsonian magazine that Earth observation satellites “can potentially solve some very important problems that we have around the way we manage carbon balances in the atmosphere and remove them from the atmosphere, but only if we are able to calibrate those scales effectively… and validate what they are .” seeing it again with a fairly rigorous series of measurements on the ground.”

Tewksbury notes that teamwork and partnership make the work possible, among NASA, the Smithsonian, other Earth observation agencies and many collaborators around the world. “What I love about it is the power of collective science,” he says. “We’re now getting to a point where you can’t get what you need for the world unless you work together globally on a solution.”

The exhibition aims to provide a ‘larger-than-life view of the world’, according to director of the National Museum of Natural History Kirk Johnson says in an emailed statement to Smithsonian magazine. Viewing the planet from the ground and above highlights the global reach of the scientific observations documenting Earth’s past and present – ​​and exploring its future.

Views of Earth from space have historically brought about a powerful change in the way people see the planet. The iconic Earthrise photo, taken during the Apollo 8 mission, showed our world from space and galvanized the environmental movement. In 1990, the Voyager 1 probe captured an image of Earth from about four billion miles away, showing the planet looks like a fragile speck. This gave people an unprecedented look at our place in the universe and inspired Sagan to write about the importance of our ‘pale blue dot’.

“NASA astronauts have famously described how seeing Earth from space is an experience that fundamentally changes the way they think about their relationships with other people and life on our planet,” Johnson added. “By bringing NASA’s Hyperwall to our museum in this exhibit, our visitors can get a glimpse of how interconnected our world is and perhaps open their eyes to the profound perspective astronauts in space have described.”

The Earth Information Center will be on display through 2028 and will change like the Earth as new videos and updated data will be added to the display over time.