In 1997 when the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM, was launched, its mission was scheduled to last just a few years. Now, 17 years later, the TRMM mission has come to an end. NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) stopped TRMM's science operations and data collection on 8 April after the spacecraft depleted its fuel reserves.

Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina

Part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field - the world's second largest contiguous extrapolar ice field - and two lakes are pictured in this Landsat-8 image of Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park, acquired on 28 February 2014.

The Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS), which will fly aboard NOAA's Joint Polar Satellite System-1 satellite, has been successfully integrated with the spacecraft. CrIS is the fourth instrument to be integrated on the JPSS-1 spacecraft.

Looking at how weather patterns have changed over the decades can help us gain insights into climate change. This requires observations going as far back as possible, but finding such data is a challenge. At the same time, advances in science, for example using state-of-the-art reanalysis, mean that more information can be extracted from past data than when the observations were made.

Four federal agencies including the U.S. Geological Survey have joined forces in an effort to transform satellite data into vital information to protect the American public from freshwater contaminated by harmful algal blooms.

The SPOT-1 to 5 mission archive, SPOT-6 and 7 mission archive and new acquisitions, Pleiades mission archive and new acquisitions, and SPOTMAPS 2.5 complete dataset are now available to the scientific user community.