Explore Earth in 3D with NASA Blue Marble imagery

Measured facts

Classification

Terrestrial planet

Mean radius

6,371 kmPublished mean radius stored as renderer geometry.

Mean diameter

12,742 km

Mean radius in Earth radii

1.00

Appearance

Tiled observational surface

Observation epoch

Historical multi-observation mosaic; not live

What you are looking at

The surface is the Blue Marble Next Generation shaded-relief and bathymetry layer served as native 256-pixel tiles through NASA EOSDIS GIBS, refined to zoom 8. COSMOS reprojects those Web Mercator tiles onto spherical patches.

It is a composite, not a photograph. Land colour, ocean colour and sea ice come from different observations, combined into a cloud-free global mosaic, and the source shading in the relief layer is not geometry.

Earth keeps its verified GMST and mean-obliquity orientation model with UT1 approximated by UTC. Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune instead use NAIF pck00011 body-fixed models, and the Galilean moons share Jupiter’s.

Distance, scale and light time

Distances here are computed from the shipped JPL Horizons state archive, sampled once per day across its declared coverage (2020-01-01 00:00 TDB through 2040-01-01 00:00 TDB). Earth is the origin of the Earth-centred frame, so its distance from Earth is zero by definition.

The heliocentric figure is the meaningful one for Earth: the mean distance from the Sun changes through the year because Earth’s orbit is slightly elliptical.

Distance from the Sun

1.010 AU · 151,090,743 kmComputed in the same epochs and frame (Earth-centred ecliptic J2000.0 / ICRF).

Delivery and camera limits

COSMOS stops the camera at 6,551 km from the body centre (180 km above the mean-radius surface) for Earth. Surface providers are protected because every imagery product has a native ground sampling distance, and magnifying past it would imply resolution the dataset does not contain.

Appearance status

Tiled observational surface

Renderer provider id

earth-visual-v1

Declared resolution

500 m source visualization; delivered to zoom 8 (~611 m/px at equator)

Closest permitted approach

6,551 km from the body centre (180 km above the mean-radius surface)180 km minimum safe altitude keeps delivered imagery pixels near the rendered pixel footprint. The renderer clamps the camera's centre distance, so the two figures differ by one mean radius.

Rotation model

Earth-fixed → ecliptic J2000 — GMST / mean obliquity; UT1 ≈ UTCNo external orientation kernel is used for this body.

Geometry

mean-radius-sphereMean-radius sphere; no ellipsoid or terrain displacement yet

Provenance

Appearance provenance is carried by the provider at runtime, not added by the page: an active appearance layer is registered.

Category

observational-composite

Provider

NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS)

Project / mission

NASA EOSDIS / Blue Marble Next Generation

Dataset

BlueMarble_ShadedRelief_Bathymetry

Version

GIBS best-available static layer, checked 2026-08-29

Licence

NASA imagery usage guidelines; no commercial-provider dependency

Attribution

Imagery courtesy NASA EOSDIS GIBS

Source checked

2026-08-29

Limitations COSMOS discloses

• No terrain displacement
• Static mosaic does not change with ephemeris date
• Detail stops at the delivered imagery ceiling
• No terrain displacement: the relief shading is baked into the source imagery, not a height model.
• The mosaic does not change with the selected ephemeris date; it is a static composite.
• Detail stops at roughly 611 m per pixel at the equator, and the camera will not descend below 180 km.
• Position is interpolated inside 2020-01-01 00:00 TDB through 2040-01-01 00:00 TDB; requesting an epoch outside that window is rejected instead of extrapolated.