New Delhi: Google introduced a cloud-free mosaic of the world three years ago that gave Google Earth and Google Map users a better and more accurate view of the earth.
The search giant has recently decided to improve its view and provide crisp imagery from NASA and the US Geographical Surveys Landsat 8 satellite.
Earlier, Google provided cloud-free images using imagery from the Landsat 7 satellite. But as the Landsat 7 images captured after 2003 were affected by a hardware failure, there were large diagonal gaps and missing data.
Now, Google has updated Google Earth with the imagery from Landsat 8, launched into the orbit in 2013. This update will provide satellite imagery on the app with more detail and better colours.
“Landsat 8 captures images with greater detail, truer colours, and at an unprecedented frequency—capturing twice as many images as Landsat 7 does every day,” Google said in a blog post.
Much of the earth is usually covered by clouds, but Google Maps examined through photo after photo to piece together the "clearest pixels" from more than 700 trillion pixels. The result after the examination is a clear view of the Earth's surface with more details visible than before.
Google in its blog also thanked the USGS (United States Geological Survey) and NASA for their joint Landsat program, which has been tracking and recording changes to the Earth's surface since 1972, and making the resultant imagery available in a free and accessible manner.
