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Thanks to the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite—the nation’s first operational satellite in deep space—you can see daily pictures of the Earth. NASA launched the satellite last February and handed the reigns over to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) a little over a week ago.
NOAA says it will use the satellite to "monitor and warn of severe and potentially dangerous space weather events." Solar storms can produce the beautiful Northern Lights or Aurora borealis, we were treated to here in the U.S. earlier this week, but they can also cause "major disruptions to our infrastructure," says NASA.
The DSCOVR satellite is carrying a camera—EPIC, or Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera—which regularly snaps photos of the Earth from its position in space about a million miles away. A slideshow of the Earth's full rotation is then posted to a website and tweeted out. You may remember hearing about EPIC, which took the "Blue Marble" photo that wowed everyone, including President Obama, in July. And the space camera also snapped a rare picture of the dark side of the moon in August.
If you're geeking out about space and looking for more, you can watch a live stream of two astronauts doing a spacewalk to perform maintenance at the International Space Station.
Astronomer Carl Sagan said we have to cherish our "pale blue dot" because it's the "only home we've ever known." President Obama said the "blue marble" photo was a "beautiful reminder that we need to protect the only planet we have." And earlier this week astronaut Scott Kelly gave us this image to reflect upon ahead of the Paris climate talks:
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By Coral Natalie Negrón Almodóvar
The Earth began to shake as Tamar Hernández drove to visit her mother in Yauco, Puerto Rico, on Dec. 28, 2019. She did not feel that first tremor — she felt only the ensuing aftershocks — but she worried because her mother had an ankle injury and could not walk. Then Hernández thought, "What if something worse is coming our way?"
President Trump has long touted the efficacy of walls, funneling billions of Defense Department dollars to build a wall on the southern border. However, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) released a study that included plans for a sea wall to protect New Yorkers from sea-level rise and catastrophic storms like Hurricane Sandy, Trump mocked it as ineffective and unsightly.
In a post-mortem of the Australian bushfires, which raged for five months, scientists have concluded that their intensity and duration far surpassed what climate models had predicted, according to a study published yesterday in Nature Climate Change.
By Tim Radford
The Texan city of Houston is about to grow in unexpected ways, thanks to the rising tides. So will Dallas. Real estate agents in Atlanta, Georgia; Denver, Colorado; and Las Vegas, Nevada could expect to do roaring business.
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