I wanted to emphasize this point so that the account has a time-invariant relevance to it. Most importantly, even though the incident is about these particular hikers, it is not really about them! It is about the hiker personalities they represent. Not have their background (for example, their affiliation with an exceptionally famous university) generate unnecessary and irrelevant biases among the readers. Not cause them more embarrassment/ humiliation than they already went through 2. The reasons (which were so obvious to me I didn't think of mentioning them) I preserved the hikers identities were 1. With that development, I have received requests to change this and that details (some ridiculously minor), or to choose different words which would subtly change the narrative to make some of the people involved appear in different light. However, recently a news piece came out on the incident and it, among other things, revealed the identities of the hikers. In that, I believe the account has served its purpose (and hope it continues to). The third and final UPDATE: A week after writing it, I can confirm that this writeup has dissuaded several novice hikers with no mountaineering experience in doing Whitney until the switchbacks open up.
įor information on Earth science activities aboard the International Space Station, visit. More information about ECOSTRESS is available here. 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. 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. The ECOSTRESS mission launched to the International Space Station on June 29, 2018. The nature of the high-resolution data provided by ECOSTRESS allows it to record heat related phenomena such as heat waves and wildfires. 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. It was launched to the space station in 2018. This Land Surface Temperature image captured by ECOSTRESS on Jshows temperatures exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley and temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range.ĮCOSTRESS 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. Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States with an elevation of 14,505 ft.
During the summer months, Death Valley can become one of the hottest places on Earth. JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)ĭeath Valley, California is a desert valley in the Northern Mojave Desert.
Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in