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Moon and Earth — The moon passes across Earth’s disk in a July 16 image captured by the DSCOVR satellite from its observation point, a million miles out in space. The Americas and the Pacific Ocean are visible beneath Earth’s cloud cover. Because the moon was moving while DSCOVR acquired the data for this three-filter image, there appears to be a thin green offset on the right side of the moon’s disk, and red and blue offsets on the left. (Credit: NASA / NOAA)

The Deep Space Climate Observatory, better known as DSCOVR, is designed to provide full-disk, sunlit views of our home planet from a vantage point a million miles away. But every so often, the moon crosses through the frame. Today, NASA released the first amazing photobomb sequence.

The perspective from DSCOVR’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (a.k.a. EPIC), captured on July 16, provides a topsy-turvy view: Here we’re seeing the moon’s far side, which earthbound skywatchers can never observe. And although it looks like a full moon, on Earth the moon was in its totally dark, “new” phase.

This isn’t the first lunar photobombing: NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft caught the moon crossing Earth’s half-lit disk back in 2008. But when DSCOVR goes into full operation next month and starts sending back near-real-time images, we can expect to see a new-moon photobomb roughly twice a year.

Launched in February, DSCOVR is a joint mission of NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with the twin objectives of making climate observations and keeping watch for incoming solar storms.

The Earth-watching part of the mission follows through on an idea put forward by Vice President Al Gore back in the 1990s – and the former veep was obviously tickled to see the latest pictures released from NASA’s lockbox:

.@Nasa just released an incredible video of the moon passing in front of the Earth from #DSCOVR’s vantage point https://t.co/pRSjQDUWp8

— Al Gore (@algore) August 5, 2015

A version of this item was published August 5, 2015, on GeekWire. For more from Alan Boyle, check out the Cosmic Log Google+ archive.

Federally funded lab enlists AI to safeguard security

Re-publishing to correct link to GeekWire article

Bringing artificial intelligence to bear on issues relating to nuclear weapons might sound like the stuff of a scary sci-fi movie — but at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, it’s just one of the items on the to-do list.

One of PNNL’s research priorities is to identify and combat complex threats to national security, and AI can help meet that priority by detecting attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or associated technology.

Nuclear proliferation detection is one of the potential applications that could get an assist from the Center for AI @PNNL, a newly announced effort to coordinate research that makes use of AI tools — including the generative AI tools that have captured the attention of the tech world over the past year or two.

“For decades we’ve been doing artificial intelligence,” center director Court Corley, PNNL’s chief scientist for AI, told me in a recent interview. “What we’re seeing now, though, is an exceptional phase shift in where AI is being used and how it’s being used.”

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