Images from NASA's orbiting Terra spacecraft show the fire plume from Manhattan on Tuesday after the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard Terra has a sweeping 2,330-km-wide viewing swath that allows it to see every point on our world every 1-2 days in 36 discrete spectral bands.

False-color image from Terra. Photo: NASA

Black and white image from Terra. Photo: NASA

Another view from Terra. Photo: NASA

These images were put together from MODIS data at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. They were taken from an altitude between 620 and 876 nautical miles above the Earth's surface.