{"id":16278,"date":"2015-06-09T00:44:08","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T16:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/dscovr-space-weather-sentinel-reaches-finish-line\/"},"modified":"2015-06-09T00:44:08","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T16:44:08","slug":"dscovr-space-weather-sentinel-reaches-finish-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/dscovr-space-weather-sentinel-reaches-finish-line\/","title":{"rendered":"DSCOVR space weather sentinel reaches finish line"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The
The Deep Space Climate Observatory is operating at the L1 Lagrange point a million miles from Earth in line with the sun. Credit: NOAA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A new space weather observatory launched in February has completed a four-month journey to an operating post a million miles from Earth, NOAA announced Monday.<\/p>\n

The $340 million mission will look for bursts of particles coming from the sun in the solar wind, giving forecasters warning of solar storms that could disrupt radio communications, electrical grids, satellite operations and air travel.<\/p>\n

The Deep Space Climate Observatory blasted off Feb. 11 on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, beginning a journey to the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitationally-stable location a million miles from Earth in line with the sun.<\/p>\n

Since its launch from Cape Canaveral, DSCOVR has deployed its power-generating solar panels and extended a mechanical boom holding the spacecraft\u2019s primary solar wind detector.<\/p>\n

DSCOVR arrived Sunday and entered a looping halo orbit around L1, where it will complete final instrument checks before entering service as soon as July. Once operational, DSCOVR will be the first U.S. weather satellite in deep space.<\/p>\n

NOAA expects the mission to last at least two years, and DSCOVR carries enough fuel to function for five years.<\/p>\n

The observatory\u2019s instruments will monitor the constant stream of the solar wind, providing notice of activity that could generate solar storms.<\/p>\n

\u201cDSCOVR will trigger early warnings whenever it detects a surge of energy that could cause a geomagnetic storm that could bring possible damaging impacts for Earth,\u201d said Stephen Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA\u2019s satellite and information service, in a statement.<\/p>\n

\"DSCOVR
DSCOVR launched from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 11 on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: SpaceX<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The mission had to wait nearly two decades since its inception after the project became tied up in political wrangling in Washington.<\/p>\n

First proposed by then-Vice President Al Gore in 1998, the mission was supposed to broadcast live views of Earth from a distant vista a million miles away for live streaming on the Internet. Gore believed the mission \u2014 which Gore named Triana after one of the sailors on Columbus\u2019s 1492 voyage to the new world \u2014 would raise awareness of environmental issues, and scientists developed instruments to collect data on the planet\u2019s climate.<\/p>\n

But Republican lawmakers decried the mission as Gore\u2019s pet project, and Congress ordered NASA to stop work on Triana in late 1999. The space agency transferred the nearly-complete satellite into storage in November 2001 after President George W. Bush took office.<\/p>\n

NASA formally canceled the mission in 2005 after renaming Triana as DSCOVR. The space agency said the spacecraft, which was originally designed to launch on the space shuttle, could not fit on one of the shuttle\u2019s remaining missions.<\/p>\n

NOAA took charge of the mission to replace NASA\u2019s aging Advanced Composition Explorer, which launched in 1997 and is operating well beyond its design life. ACE supplies early warning data on brewing solar storms.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Air Force also signed on to the project, agreeing to pay $97 million for DSCOVR\u2019s launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Air Force will use the space weather data for military purposes.<\/p>\n

\u201cDSCOVR will serve as our tsunami buoy in space, if you will, giving forecasters up to an hour\u2019s warning of these huge magnetic eruptions from the sun that occasionally occur, called Coronal Mass Ejections, or CMEs,\u201d said Tom Berger, director of NOAA\u2019s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, before the mission\u2019s Feb. 11 launch.<\/p>\n

Berger\u2019s team will use DSCOVR data to produce space weather forecasts to better predict which areas of Earth could be impacted by a solar storm.<\/p>\n

DSCOVR was already fitted with the instruments to detect fluctuations in the intensity, direction, velocity and temperature of the solar wind. The satellite still has the camera and radiometer to take pictures of Earth and track the planet\u2019s energy budget.<\/p>\n

Scientists hope the Earth science payload, which is operated by NASA and is now considered a secondary objective behind DSCOVR\u2019s solar wind detection role, will help sort out how much of the sun\u2019s energy is reflected back into space. The data point could help researchers determine how much humans contribute to Earth\u2019s changing climate.<\/p>\n

The door to DSCOVR\u2019s Earth-viewing camera was expected to open some time after the satellite\u2019s arrival at L1. Its first views of Earth should be released in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n

The imager will take a full-color picture of the sunlit side of Earth every four-to-six hours, and NASA plans to post the imagery on a public website.<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Deep Space Climate Observatory is operating at the L1 Lagrange point a million miles from Earth in line with the sun. Credit: NOAA A new space weather observatory launched in February has completed a four-month journey to an operating post a million miles from Earth, NOAA announced Monday. The $340 million mission will look […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2308,2310,975,340],"class_list":["post-16278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-dscovr","tag-l1-lagrange-point","tag-noaa","tag-space-weather"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16278"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}