The photo was taken by a camera appropriately called EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera), which sports a 4 megapixel CCD camera and telescope. The first image released was taken July 6 and released Monday by the White House, in conjunction with the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
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“Just got this new blue marble photo from @NASA”.
The spacecraft, about the size of a small vehicle, reached its observing station at the L1 Lagrange point a million miles from Earth on June 7.
The camera takes a series of 10 images using different narrowband filters – from ultraviolet to near infrared.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon that so many people who will never have the chance to float out there in the vastness of space know exactly what our planet looks like from afar.
You live here, so we figure you ought to be well grounded in Earth facts.
The primary objective of DSCOVR, a partnership between Nasa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US 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. Good luck!
“This first DSCOVR image of our planet demonstrates the unique and important benefits of Earth observation from space”, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in the same statement.
“The high quality of the EPIC images exceeded all of our expectations in resolution”, DSCOVR project scientist Adam Szabo, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.
The satellite’s sideline in taking dazzling photos of our planet will give the denizens of Earth plenty of new images to pore over, putting our little place in the galaxy into perspective.
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Created to provide early warnings of potentially-disruptive geomagnetic storms resulting from solar outbursts, DSCOVR also carries Earth-observing instruments that will monitor ozone and aerosols in the atmosphere and measure the amount of energy received, reflected, and emitted by Earth – the planet’s “energy budget. There will be a huge wealth of new data for scientists to explore”.
