From a million miles away, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR)
is capturing sparkling glints of light in images of Earth.
The Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC)
on board DSCOVR has seen hundreds of these flashes,
caused by sunlight reflecting off tiny ice particles floating in the air almost horizontally.
DSCOVR is not the first satellite to see the sun glints.
In 1990, the Galileo spacecraft
captured some of these flashes in Earth’s atmosphere while en route to Jupiter.
Studying the glints from DSCOVR can offer insight
about how light reflects off Earth’s atmosphere,
and how that could affect the planet’s radiation budget.
In the future, a similar method could potentially be used to identify ice crystals
in the atmosphere of exoplanets, an early step to evaluating their habitability.