The Greatest Show on Earth: Earth Time-Lapse Shows Pictures Fetched by GE-Designed Satellites

Google, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and TIME have stitched together tens of thousands of satellite images taken over the last 30 years into stunning interactive time-lapse animations that reveal how civilization alters the face of Earth – from your town to palm islands sprouting off the coast of Dubai, retreating Alaskan glaciers, and the vanishing Amazon rainforest.

This time-lapse video shows the rate of Dubai's growth at one frame per year from 2000 through 2011. Source: NASA

Google used its Google Earth Engine technology to analyze more than 2 million images stored on tapes in USGS vaults and find those without clouds for every year since 1984.

GE has something to do with the picture show. GE engineers led the design, integration and testing of the 14-foot, 4,400-pound Landsat 4 and Landsat 5 satellites that photographed the planet from 1982 until 2012. The company also managed the flight and ground missions of the spacecraft, and GE’s digital image analysis lab in Lanham, Maryland, processed ground images to reveal details as small as 30 meters long, such as highways and bridges.

In March 2012, Landsat 5 earned a Guinness World Record as the “longest-operating Earth observation satellite.” The spacecraft was designed for a three-year mission but served for nearly 30 years. (Landsat 4 stopped sending pictures in 1993.)

Landsat satellites - there have been seven in the history of the program - fly 423 miles above the Earth along a sun-synchronous polar orbit that keeps the angle of the light falling on the face of the planet nearly constant. Each satellite records a continuous ribbon of the surface below, completing 14.5 orbits per day, or one per every 100 minutes. (NASA recently released a 20-minute-long video showing Landsat footage in which the satellite, traveling at 16,800 mph, covered the distance from northern Russia to the tip of southern Africa.)

Besides Landsats 4 and 5, GE also manufactured the program’s first three satellites. Since Landsat 1 launched in 1972, the U.S. and international partners have used the program to monitor agriculture, land use, climate change and disaster relief.