NASA's New Website: Every Day - A Fresh Photo of the Earth from Space

The NASA agency not only looks at the stars, figuratively speaking, but also does not stop paying close attention to the Earth. The agency recently opened a new site on which high-resolution photos of the Earth are laid out every day. The pictures always show the sunny side of the Earth. Photos are sent by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) station, located a couple of million kilometers from Earth.

Once a day, the agency uploads a dozen new color images of our planet, photographs taken by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). The sequence of images shows a change in the position of the Earth, so that in each new image you can see a new region. The site also has a search where the date or continent is specified as a criterion.

The main objective of NOAA's DSCOVR mission is to track the activity of the solar wind, which allows us to give accurate forecasts of terrestrial weather in different regions. The station has two tools for monitoring the Earth. So, EPIC helps planet scientists see the height of clouds in various locations and their reflectivity, recognize the concentration of ozone and aerosols.


Photo: NASA

EPIC is a 4 MP CCD camera and telescope. Color images of the Earth are created by combining three photographs taken through different filters. As a result, we get a high-quality color image, an analogue of the image obtained by a 12 MP camera. The camera works by taking photographs in grays of 10 images, with various filters, including UV and infrared filters. Red, green and blue filters are used to create color images. The size of each image is 3 MB.

The real resolution of the DSCOVR EPIC camera is 10 and 15 kilometers.

Since the Earth is a very bright object, EPIC takes a photo with a minimum shutter speed of 20-100 milliseconds. As a result, the Earth is visible in the pictures, but there are no stars - much dimmer objects.

DSCOVR station is in orbit of the Lagrange point L1.

EPIC built at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center, California. Using a 30-centimeter telescope and a 2048 x 2048 CCD detector, EPIC operates in the ultraviolet, visible, and infrared spectra.

Daily Earth imagery can be seen on this site .