NASA MODIS Image of the Day: May 24, 2011 – New Mexico
Clear skies greeted the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite as it passed over the southwestern United States on May 13, 2011.
The instrument captured this true-color image of a cloud-free New Mexico on the same day.
In the north of the image, the peaks of the Jemez Mountains are covered with white snow. The roughly circular ridge encircles the Valle Caldera, a 22 kilometer (14 mile) wide caldera formed by the collapse of a magma chamber in ancient times. Plants now colonize parts of the caldera as well as the surrounding valleys, giving it a dark green appearance. The city of Los Alamos lies just to the east of the caldera. The Rio Grande River can be seen running from north to south near the center of the image. This river rises in the high mountains of southern Colorado and flows southward through New Mexico, then forms the border between Texas and Mexico before it flows into the Gulf of Mexico at Cameron County, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico. In the southern section of the image a large white, roughly circular area can be seen. This is the White Sands, the world’s largest gypsum dune field. The glistening white sand dunes cover about 710 square kilometers (275 sq. mi.) of the Tularosa Basin, a graben basin lying within the Chihuahuan Desert. To the east, the Sacramento Mountains can be seen while the San Andres and Oscura Mountains lie to the west. The White Sands National Monument was formed to preserve the southern section of the dunes. The national monument is entirely surrounded by the White Sands Missile Range. The White Sands Space Harbor, north of the Monument, is an emergency landing site for the space shuttle, with two 11,000 mi and one 12,800 mi runway available for landing on a dry lakebed. One mission, the STS-3, used this site to land the Space Shuttle Columbia. The elongated lake just north of the White Sands is Elephant Butte Reservoir, the largest reservoir in New Mexico. The reservoir was created as part of a project to provide power and irrigation to the surrounding areas, and was filled beginning between 1915 and 1916. It provides irrigation to 720 square kilometers (178,000 acres) of land.
