Today’s Tech Photo: What airplanes look like from space

We only know what an airplane looks like from the ground or on-board, but now The European Space Agency revealed this photo to give us some insight into what aircraft flight actually looks like from space.

The ESA’s CubeSat, GomX-3, detected aircraft in flight over the last six months since it was released from the International Space Station back in October. The 3-unit CubeSat was built by GomSpace in Denmark and has picked up millions of ADS-B signals which offer flight information like speed, position and altitude.

The agency laid it all out in this map for us. In the coming years, all aircraft entering European airspace are envisaged to provide this kind of automatic surveillance.

Image via ESA.