Pic of the Week: Let the Games Begin!

A false-color image of the skiing and snowboarding sites for the Sochi Winter Olympic Games, acquired on Jan. 4, 2014, by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft. (Source: NASA) The Winter Olympics in Sochi are set to begin, so I thought I'd share this remote sensing image of the skiing and snowboarding sites. In this false color view looking southwest, the red colors are indicative of vegetation. The Rosa Khutar ski resort is in the big valley at the center of the image. Look for the runs on the shadowed slopes on the left-hand side of the valley. Those runs do look quite radical, and I'm sure they are in many spots. But height has been exaggerated 1.5 times in this view to accentuate topographic details, according to NASA. The image was acquired on Jan. 4, 2014 by the ASTER instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft.