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Aaland Archipelago, Finland

April 27, 2011
This image, acquired by NASA's Terra spacecraft, is of the Aaland archipelago at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia which belongs to Finland, though it enjoys autonomy from Helsinki and locals speak Swedish.

Two bottles of 200-year old champagne recently salvaged from a Baltic Sea shipwreck will be auctioned off in June. Finland's autonomous province of Aaland has decided that two bottles will be sold at an exclusive champagne auction held in (the capital) Mariehamn. One of the auctioned bottles will be from the house of Veuve-Clicquot and the other from the now extinct house of Juglar. They are part of a batch of around 150 champagne bottles divers stumbled upon last July in a two-masted schooner which had run aground sometime between 1825 and 1830. The Aaland archipelago at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia belongs to Finland, though it enjoys autonomy from Helsinki and locals speak Swedish. The image was acquired September 1, 2003, covers an area of 56 x 54.7 km, and is located at 60.3 degrees north latitude, 20.7 degrees east longitude.

With its 14 spectral bands from the visible to the thermal infrared wavelength region and its high spatial resolution of 15 to 90 meters (about 50 to 300 feet), ASTER images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet. ASTER is one of five Earth-observing instruments launched Dec. 18, 1999, on Terra. The instrument was built by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. A joint U.S./Japan science team is responsible for validation and calibration of the instrument and data products.

The broad spectral coverage and high spectral resolution of ASTER provides scientists in numerous disciplines with critical information for surface mapping and monitoring of dynamic conditions and temporal change. Example applications are: monitoring glacial advances and retreats; monitoring potentially active volcanoes; identifying crop stress; determining cloud morphology and physical properties; wetlands evaluation; thermal pollution monitoring; coral reef degradation; surface temperature mapping of soils and geology; and measuring surface heat balance.

The U.S. science team is located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The Terra mission is part of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.

More information about ASTER is available at http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/.

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