It’s been a year since NASA unveiled the first image of Earth’s sunlit side captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, and to celebrate the occasion, you can see an entire year’s worth of DSCOVR’s view in less than three minutes.
The scientists behind DSCOVR’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, or EPIC, assembled more than 3,000 images to create this week’s video clip.
“The colors shown are our best estimate of what a human sitting at the location of EPIC would see,” EPIC lead scientist Jay Herman says during the video.
DSCOVR keeps watch on our planet from a gravitationally stable vantage point known as Earth-Sun L1, about a million miles above the planet. The DSCOVR mission started out in 1998 as the brainchild of then-Vice President Al Gore, who loved the idea of having a satellite that could provide a continuous full-disk view of our home planet.
After Gore left office, the mission was mothballed – but it was revived years later as a project to monitor space weather as well as climate indicators on Earth. NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Air Force worked together to get the mission off the ground.
DSCOVR was launched in February 2015, and EPIC started sending pictures back last July.
The satellite has chronicled lots of interesting phenomena occurring on Earth and in space. Twice over the past year, EPIC has snapped pictures of the moon passing in front of Earth in its orbit.
A different series of images tracked the moon’s shadow as it swept over Earth during a total solar eclipse in March. And still other pictures have followed the movements of storms or plumes of smoke across land and sea.
Check out this video for seven of EPIC’s greatest hits:
For even more from EPIC, check out the near-real-time imagery on this NASA website.
