Death Valley, California is a desert valley in the Northern Mojave Desert. During the summer months, Death Valley can become one of the hottest places on Earth. Death Valley is about 85 miles from Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States with an elevation of 14,505 ft. This Land Surface Temperature image captured by ECOSTRESS on July 07, 2022 shows temperatures exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley and temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range.

ECOSTRESS is a thermal instrument on the International Space Station that measures the temperature of the ground, which is hotter than the air temperature during the day. It was launched to the space station in 2018. Its primary mission is to identify critical thresholds of water use and water stress in plants and to detect the timing, location, and predictive factors leading to plant water uptake decline and/or cessation. The nature of the high-resolution data provided by ECOSTRESS allows it to record heat related phenomena such as heat waves and wildfires.

The ECOSTRESS mission launched to the International Space Station on June 29, 2018. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages the mission for the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. ECOSTRESS is an Earth Venture Instrument mission; the program is managed by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

More information about ECOSTRESS is available here: https://ecostress.jpl.nasa.gov/.

For information on Earth science activities aboard the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/issearthscience.