DSCOVR: Offering A New View of the Solar Wind
The solar arrays on NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft, or DSCOVR, are unfurled in the Building 1 high bay at the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Florida, near Kennedy Space Center.
There's a fascinating spot some 932,000 miles away from Earth where the gravity between the sun and Earth is perfectly balanced. This spot captures the attention of orbital engineers because a satellite can orbit this spot, called Lagrange 1 just as they can orbit a planet. But the spot tantalizes scientists as well: Lagrange 1 lies outside Earth's magnetic environment, a perfect place to measure the constant stream of particles from the sun, known as the solar wind, as they pass by.
In early February, the United States Air Force will launch a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite called Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, into orbit around this spot. NOAA will use DSCOVR to monitor the solar wind and forecast space weather at Earth -- effects from the material and energy from the sun that can impact our satellites and technological infrastructure on Earth.
However, the three solar wind instruments on board are also exciting researchers with the hope of untangling some unsolved science mysteries about the solar wind. Two of the instruments were built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.