New EPIC camera to photograph Earth in a way it has never been before

That’s not all, though. What makes this interesting is that the camera will also capture the sunlit face of Earth in its entirety — the first time this has happened since the Galileo mission to Jupiter in the 1990s. A lone satellite has actually never done this before, either. The way it is now, multiple satellites have to photograph the Earth from different vantage points, after which scientists then piece the photos together.Earth will soon be photographed in a way it never has been before. Onboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite is a Lockheed Martin-built camera called EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera). The National Oceanic and Atmosphere Association (NOAA) and NASA plan to use EPIC to collect atmospheric data.

To get the new full Earth picture, scientists won’t power up EPIC until it reaches Lagrange point 1, or L1 orbit, which the spacecraft will in about three months from now.

So what exactly is this thing? EPIC is an 11.8-inch telescope and 2K-by-2K CCD (charge-coupled device) that measures UV and visible spectrum with a resolution of 15.5 to 21.7 miles. EPIC’s instrument architecture will allow it to snap photos in 10 super-narrow wavelength ranges, in order to detect things like volcanic ash, aerosols, and ozone. It will provide data for people working in climate science, biogeochemistry, and ecology, among others. It will also enable more accurate forecasts of solar wind speed, density, and temperature.

Compare the ease of this with, say, the Portrait of Global Aerosols from two years ago; to create that, NASA and NOAA’s GEOS-5 system had to aggregate measurements from hundreds of weather stations across Earth, along with data from the four NASA/NOAA GOES weather satellites.

Once EPIC (pictured above) is fully up and running, it will send back images of the sunlit face of the Earth every 110 minutes, in each of the 10 wavelengths it can see. That is much faster than what we were able to do before; from Low Earth Orbit (LEO), it takes satellites approximately 16 days to traverse the globe.

The scientists behind EPIC are hoping for it to deliver a total of 10,000 images over the next two years. The DSCOVR mission launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and is a partnership between NOAA, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force. I can’t wait to see the results; it could have a cultural impact on the scale of the famous Blue Marble photo, except this time it will be for the Earth’s climate in near-real time, as opposed to seeing the Earth itself for the first time.