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Astronomer Carl Sagan famously wrote that humanity has a responsibility to “preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Today, that quote in all its gravity is displayed on a wall in NASA’s new Earth Information Center exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History. Earth—the delicate orb Sagan described—is ever-evolving, and those changes are now on view in the form of data visualizations and graphics. On a series of walls and screens, satellite observations reveal the state of our planet, from polar ice loss and sea-level rise to the impacts of hurricanes, wildfires and floods.
The focal point of the exhibition is a 32-foot-long, 12-foot-high screen called a “Hyperwall” that shows views of Earth from space and on the ground, featuring informative visuals made from satellite data. The display offers an overview of the most pressing global environmental issues, illustrating how Earth is affected by human activity with real-time looks at the planet’s climate, weather, land and water.
Despite its far-reaching goals to send humans back to the moon, explore Mars and identify 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 keeps tabs on localized environmental conditions and planet-wide changes. Its climate and weather data are meant to inform federal and community-level policies and the decisions we make as humans.
“NASA is a climate agency,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says in a statement. “With our fleet of over two dozen Earth-observing satellites and instruments, NASA leverages our unique vantage point in space to observe our planet and help those 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.”
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The Hyperwall doesn’t just display the current condition of the planet—it also showcases short-form videos that detail environmental research being done around the world, enabled by satellites. One video highlights the forest cover tracking work of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO). As forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, these ground-based measurements can “help calibrate efforts to monitor carbon storage and sinks with satellites in space,” verifying the satellite observations.
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute director Joshua Tewksbury tells Smithsonian magazine that Earth-observing satellites “potentially can solve some really important problems we have around how we manage carbon balances in the atmosphere and get it out of the atmosphere, but only if we are able to calibrate those scales effectively … and validate what they’re seeing with a fairly rigorous set 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 globe. “What I love about it is it’s the power of collective science,” he says. “We’re now getting to a place in which you can’t get what you need for the world unless you collaborate globally on a solution.”
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The exhibition is meant to provide a “larger-than-life look at the world,” as National Museum of Natural History director Kirk Johnson says in a statement emailed to Smithsonian magazine. Seeing the planet from the ground and from above emphasizes the global reach of the scientific observations that document Earth’s past and present—and examine its future.
Views of Earth from space have, in the past, powerfully shifted the way humans see the planet. The iconic Earthrise photograph, captured during the Apollo 8 mission, showed our world from space and galvanized the environmental movement. In 1990, the Voyager 1 probe took an image of Earth from about four billion miles away, with the planet looking like a fragile speck. This gave humans 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 seeing Earth from space as an experience that fundamentally changes the way that they think about their relationship with other people and life on our planet,” Johnson adds. “Bringing NASA’s Hyperwall to our museum in this exhibit will give our visitors a glimpse at just how interconnected our world is and perhaps open their eyes to the profound perspective that astronauts up in space have described.”
The Earth Information Center is on view through 2028 and will change just like Earth does, as new videos and updated data will be added to the display over time.