WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With a swooping virtual flight over San Francisco and a dramatic demonstration of invisible pollution over India, NASA Wednesday released the first images from its new climate satellite.

The first images from the Terra spacecraft, which circles the Earth 16 times a day at an altitude of 438 miles, taking measurements of the land and atmosphere, show the potential to revolutionize climate research, NASA said.

The images, available at http://terra.nasa.gov, show haze shrouding cities in India, heat radiating from the Sahara, and pollution over the Appalachians.

``Terra is measuring a wide array of vital signs, many of them for the first time, to help us understand our planet, to distinguish between natural and man-made climate change, and to show us how the Earth's climate affects the quality of our lives,'' Yoram Kaufman, Terra project scientist, told a news briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington.

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