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[Chimes] Narrator: We’ve grown accustomed to seeing images of our planet from space, 

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but full Earth views like these have

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actually only seen by a few astronauts on their way to the moon,

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and a handful of retreating space probes like Galileo 

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as they peered back toward home for the last time.

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But thanks to the EPIC camera on the DSCOVR satellite we now have a new 

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image of the entire sunlit side of the Earth every two hours. 

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Of course, satellites in low- 

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Earth orbit give us high-resolution images of the planet every day,

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but they need to be patched together over time to make a composite

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“blue marble.”Seeing the full sunlit side

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of the Earth at once will advance our understanding of dust particles,

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or aerosols, traveling in the atmosphere, the height and location of 

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daytime clouds, and the amount of the sun’s energy

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reflected by the Earth, all of which help calculate the Earth’s 

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energy balance for climate studies. DSCOVR is the first 

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Earth-observing satellite parked in orbit at L1, 

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the first Lagrange point, a spot almost a million miles from Earth 

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where the gravitational pull between our planet and the sun is at perfect balance. 

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Even from so far away, EPIC will be able to make observations 

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of vegetation cover on land and individual ship tracks at sea.

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DSCOVR also has instruments facing the sun, 

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which will study the solar wind and its magnetic field, as well as give us 

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early warning of severe space weather.