A year after returning
With the voice of Jay Herman, EPIC lead scientist.
EPIC takes a new picture every two hours, revealing how the planet would look to human eyes, capturing the ever-changing motion of clouds and weather systems and the fixed features of Earth such as deserts, forests and the distinct blues of different seas. EPIC will allow scientists to monitor ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth.
The primary objective of DSCOVR, a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force, is to maintain the nation’s real-time solar wind monitoring capabilities, which are critical to the accuracy and lead time of space weather alerts and forecasts from NOAA.
Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is orbiting the Sun-Earth L1 point (1,500,000 km / 930,000 mi from Earth) in a six-month period, with a spacecraft-Earth-Sun angle varying from 4 to 15 degrees. Attached on it, EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) takes a new picture every two hours, revealing how the planet would look to human eyes, capturing the ever-changing motion of clouds and weather systems and the fixed features of Earth such as deserts, forests and the distinct blues of different seas. The camera has now recorded a full year of life on Earth from its orbit, seen here.
A million miles away, NOAA’s DSCOVR, the Nation’s first operational satellite in deep space, orbits a unique location called Lagrange point 1, or L1. This orbit is a gravity neutral point in space, allowing DSCOVR to essentially hover between the sun and Earth at all times, maintaining a constant view of the sun and sun-lit side of Earth. From here, the satellite can provide advanced solar measurements and early warnings of potentially dangerous space weather events, acting as a solar storm buoy in deep space.
Thanks to NASA’s EPIC imager, DSCOVR’s orbit also gives Earth scientists a unique vantage point for studies of the atmosphere and climate by continuously viewing the sunlit side of the planet. EPIC provides global spectral images of of Earth and insight into Earth’s energy balance. EPIC’s observations provide a unique angular perspective, and are used in science applications to measure ozone amounts, aerosol amounts, cloud height.
Sources
- DSCOVR Captures an EPIC Year on nesdis.noaa.gov
Impressive, however how can there be no sight of the moon, only its shadow, when moon is ~240k miles from Earth and Epic is 1mil miles away?
Hi Charles! Thanks for your comment. The moon could be visible only if it had passed between the camera and the Earth, but in this video, it didn’t. Here’s a view of the moon transiting the Earth from EPIC.