The DSCOVR satellite keeps tabs on Earth from a million miles away. (Credit: NASA GSFC)
It’s been a year since NASA unveiled the first image of Earth’s sunlit side captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, and to celebrate the occasion, you can see an entire year’s worth of DSCOVR’s view in less than three minutes.
The scientists behind DSCOVR’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, or EPIC, assembled more than 3,000 images to create this week’s video clip.
“The colors shown are our best estimate of what a human sitting at the location of EPIC would see,” EPIC lead scientist Jay Herman says during the video.
DSCOVR keeps watch on our planet from a gravitationally stable vantage point known as Earth-Sun L1, about a million miles above the planet. The DSCOVR mission started out in 1998 as the brainchild of then-Vice President Al Gore, who loved the idea of having a satellite that could provide a continuous full-disk view of our home planet.
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:
