NASA Satellite Sends Back Awesome Composite Photo of Earth

Recently, a NASA camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite has returned its first stunning view of the entire sun-lit side of Earth. Scientists shared that photos have a bluish tone due the scattering of sunlight by air molecules. “As a former astronaut who’s been privileged to view the Earth from orbit, I want everyone to be able to see and appreciate our planet as an integrated, interacting system”, said Bolden. The EPIC team is working to remove this atmospheric effect from subsequent images.

Form the image of the Earth taken by Voyager in 1990 at a distance of about 3.7 billion miles away shows the Earth as a trifling one pixel. These images, available 12 to 36 hours after they are acquired, will be posted to a dedicated Web page by September 2015. Clear images of desert sand, complex cloud patterns and river systems were all observed.

When the EPIC photo was presented to the White House on July 21, U.S. President Barack Obama sent a message on Twitter describing the image as a “beautiful reminder” for people to take care of the Earth, the Daily Mail reports. “There will be a huge wealth of new data for scientists to explore”.

Primarily, the objective of DSCOVR is to maintain the nation’s real- time solar wind monitoring capabilities for early warnings of space weather and forecasts.

In fact, NASA says, most other full renderings of Earth a digitized images, using a technique in which several images are stitched together. It’s from that unique vantage point that the EPIC instrument is acquiring science quality images of the entire sunlit face of Earth. It will also help to audit certain things such as vegetation, aerosols and the heights of cloud top.

And all of this new information will be archived as well as distributed by the Atmospheric Science Data Center at the NASA Langley Center.