It used to be the stuff of science fiction, but NASA’s new video puts you on a tour of the neglected, and once mysterious dark side of the moon, as it orbits the Earth. The image-series was taken on July 16th, in the timeframe 11:50-16:45 UTC, capturing the moment when the moon was passing the Pacific Ocean and reaching North America as our home planet rotated slowly beneath.
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Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said, “It is surprising how much brighter Earth is than the moon”.
Although our natural satellite is shrouded in darkness, the Blue Planet is shown in a sunlit stance very similar with other images brought to us by the global Space Station.
Using its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) the probe is designed to keep a watchful eye on our planet for the objective of monitoring the climate and to help predict space weather. It’s orbiting between the Earth and the sun at a distance of 1 million miles.
The key mission for the DSCOVR satellite will allow NOAA to monitor the solar wind in real-time so that the U.S. agency can provide advanced warnings of above average amounts of high-energy particles produced by the Sunday. But it was luck that such images were clicked from a satellite located between earth-moon system and the Sunday.
EPIC is a four megapixel CCD (charge-coupled device) camera and telescope mounted on the DSCOVR satellite. It the first high quality picture of Earth dispatched by DSCOVR, a spot atmospheric condition navigation devised to track of solar powered goes and…
In the images the Earth can be seen spining as always, when surprisingly the Moon appears in front of its larger neighbor.
The images, taken daily, will show different views of a rotating Earth and will be available to the public some 12 to 36 hours after EPIC sends them back to Earth.
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NASA promised that it would post new images taken by EPIC on a separate website starting next month.
