NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

As the world's finest athletes converge on Athens, Greece, NASA joins in the Olympic spirit by offering its unique view of the city where the Olympics were born.

Image left: The Olympic complex in Athens, as seen in a virtual zoom created at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. To zoom to the stadium, click here. Data Sources: NASA/Hubble, NASA/JPL planetary probes, DOD/Clementine, NASA/MODIS, USGS/Landsat, Space Imaging Inc./IKONOS, ESA/Hipparchos.

For the next two weeks, Athens is the center of the sports universe. That view is dramatically illustrated by a new virtual zoom that takes viewers on a trip from the moon to the Olympic stadium.

The zoom was produced at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It starts with imagery from Hubble and NASA planetary probes before arriving at the Moon courtesy of some lunar imagery based on Department of Defense data from the Clementine spacecraft. It then uses photos of Earth from NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, and approaches Greece with the help of Landsat photos from the U.S. Geological Survey. The final zoom to the Olympic Park and Olympic Stadium in Athens comes from Space Imaging's IKONOS satellite.

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The International Space Station crew is also getting into the act. Expedition 9 crewmates Mike Fincke and Genaddy Padalka helped kick off the games with a special message broadcast from the station.

"We would like to welcome the athletes and everyone assembled in Athens for this homecoming of the Olympic Games," said Astronaut Mike Fincke. "We salute the spirit of international cooperation that pulls together this greatest of athletic endeavors…Even from our outpost, we’ll be watching." The crew then showed off their version of the 100-meter sprint: a weightless flight across the space station.

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Image right: The metropolis of Athens spreads out on Greece's Attic plain, as seen from NASA's Terra satellite.
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Finally, a photo (right) from NASA's Terra satellite , part of the Earth Observing System, shows the ancient city in all its glory.

Situated on the Attic plain, Athens is surrounded by mountains on three sides, and is served by the port of Piraeus about five miles to the southwest. It was incorporated into the city-state of Athens in the ninth century B.C. and reached its golden age in the fifth century B.C. under Pericles, with a population of perhaps 200,000.

Early historic records date the ancient games to 776 B.C., when athletes gathered on Greece's Olympian plain to compete and pay tribute to the gods.

In 1896, when the modern Olympic Games were born, Athens was fittingly chosen to kick off the revival. to In 1997 the International Olympic Committee chose Athens as the host of the 2004 games.

The image was made on April 29, 2004 by the Advanced Spaceborne Themal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on board Terra. ASTER is a cooperative effort between NASA and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Earth Remote Sensing Data Analysis Center.