NASA to Publish Daily Views of Earth on New Website

Thanks to a new website launched Monday, you can get new view every day of our world from one million miles away.

The result of a space mission first proposed by Al Gore in 1998, DSCOVR blasted off in February aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket after years of starts and stops before finally winning final launch approvals under a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the U.S. Air Force.

These shots come courtesy of the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), which is a 10-channel spectroradiometer on DISCOVR.

Since the Earth is extremely bright in the darkness of space, EPIC has to take very short exposure images (20-100 milliseconds).

The new website also has an archive of images that allow people to search by date and continent. Many kinds of scientists – especially meteorologists and climatologists – should also be able to use DSCOVR:EPIC as a part of their supporting data during their research projects.

But the spacecraft also has a camera looking back at Earth, and a NASA website went live Monday showing the latest views from DSCOVR. As of 2:42:40 GMT, the sun is now almost 92.7 million miles from Earth.

Check out this time-lapse look at an entire day’s rotation of our planet, documented by 19 still images from EPIC on October. 17. It serves as a four-megapixel CCD camera and telescope.

Earlier this year, Nasa used DSCOVR to capture a attractive, rare view of the moon passing in front of the sunlit face of Earth.

There are other filters on the camera – from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared – that allow it to conduct various science investigations.

The DSCOVR spacecraft orbits around the L1 Lagrange point directly between Earth and the Sunday.

This is because its position is ‘tidally locked, which means that we always see the same face pointing towards Earth, although both sides receive equal amounts of light.

A collaboration between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the DSCOVR satellite’s main goal is to observe space weather, such as magnetic fields emitted from the Sun that can muck up our planet’s communication systems.

It was presented to the White House, prompting a tweet from President Barack Obama describing it as: ‘A attractive reminder that we need to protect the only planet we have’.