Mouth of the Amazon
Flowing more than 6,450 kilometers (4,000 miles) eastward across Brazil, the Amazon River originates in the Peruvian Andes as tiny mountain streams that eventually combine to form one of the worlds mightiest rivers. This image of the Amazons mouth was captured by the Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometers (MISRs) vertical-viewing (nadir) camera on September 8, 2000, during Terra orbit 3862. The image is approximately 380 kilometers (235 miles) in width. While the Amazon is surpassed in length by the Nile, it carries the largest volume of freshwater in the world, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the Earths discharge into the oceans. Millions of cubic feet of water empty into the Atlantic every second, and the effluent is transported across very large distances from shore. MISR was built and is managed by NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, for NASAs Office of Earth Science, Washington, DC. The Terra satellite is managed by NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology.