Watch earth as it rotates on new NASA website - V?DEO
20 October 2015
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The US space agency will, once a day, post at least a dozen new colour images of the Earth acquired 12 to 36 hours earlier by NASA`s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera or EPIC.
Each daily sequence of images will show the Earth as it rotates, thus revealing the whole globe over the course of a day.
The new website also features an archive of EPIC images that can be searched by date and continent.
The images are taken by a NASA camera one million miles away on the Deep Space Climate Observatory or DSCOVR, a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA and the US Air Force, said a NASA statement.
EPIC is a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope. The camera takes a series of 10 images to produce a variety of science products.
"The effective resolution of the EPIC camera is somewhere between 10-15 km," said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA`s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland.
Since the Earth is extremely bright in the darkness of space, EPIC has to take very short exposure images (20-100 milliseconds).
The much fainter stars are not visible in the background as a result of the short exposure times.
