Blog Archives
NOAA and NASA Open a New Set of Eyes on the Sun
These images of the sun were captured on January 29, 2017 by the six channels on the SUVI instrument on board GOES-16. (Credit: NOAA)
Look out SDO—there’s another set of eyes watching the Sun in a wide swath of wavelengths! The images above are the first from the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) instrument aboard NOAA’s new GOES-16 satellite, positioned in a geostationary orbit about 22,200 miles from Earth. These are SUVI’s first successful test images, captured on Jan. 29, 2017; once fully operational SUVI will monitor the Sun round the clock in six different UV and X-ray wavelengths, providing up-to-date data on the behavior of our home star.
Watch the first video of the Sun from GOES-16 data below:
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Earth: Enhanced! NASA’s EPIC Global Views Get an Online Image Boost
An EPIC Natural Color image (left) and an Enhanced Color image (right) of the Earth on January 26, 2017. Credit: NASA/NOAA
From a vantage point of nearly one million miles away NASA’s EPIC camera aboard NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite captures an image of the entire Earth every 1-2 hours as it rotates. For the last year and a half or so these pictures have been uploaded on the EPIC website for public viewing and use as they originally look to the EPIC instrument; now there’s an option to view Earth in “enhanced” mode, which boosts the contrast, saturation, and overall appearance to make landforms and clouds more apparent—and you can even zoom in too, in true CSI-style!
“The ‘enhanced’ color images make land features more visible,” said Sasha Marshak, DSCOVR deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is achieved by enhancing low intensity pixel values. The effect of atmospheric haze caused by air molecular scattering and attenuation of solar light by ozone has been also removed.”
Read more from NASA here: NASA Makes an EPIC Update to Website for Daily Earth Pics
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NOAA’s Newest Satellite Sends Its First Pictures of Earth…and the Moon!
GOES-16 image of the Moon beyond Earth’s limb taken Jan. 15. GOES-16 uses the Moon for calibration purposes. (NASA/NOAA)
America’s newest next-generation Earth observing weather satellite, NOAA’s GOES-16, has returned its first high-definition images of Earth—one of which even includes the Moon!
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SpaceX Sends NOAA’s DSCOVR On a Million-Mile Journey
Third time was definitely a charm today for SpaceX, NASA, and NOAA as the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) launched from Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 rocket after two scrubbed attempts. Liftoff occurred at 6:03 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Feb. 11 into a clear sky as the Sun was setting – a truly picturesque backdrop for what turned out to be a perfect launch. Visibility was good enough to catch sight of the first stage separation and payload fairing jettison from the ground!
Watch the video replay above of the launch from the NASA TV feed.
DSCOVR will journey outwards to its destination at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1 (L1), located nearly a million miles away from Earth toward the Sun. There it will insert into a stable orbit from where it can observe both the Sun and Earth, monitoring various aspects of Earth’s climate as well as keeping an eye on potentially disruptive solar storms up to a full hour before they arrive at Earth.
