The Deep Space Climate Observatory watches our planet from more than a million kilometers away
By andThe moon crosses Earth’s face in a spectacular new video captured by a spacecraft watching from a million miles away.
The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) studies the solar wind and snaps vivid shots of Earth’s surface from its position about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from the planet. Recently, the moon entered DSCOVR’s field of view, and the spacecraft caught the amazing .
“It’s surprising how much brighter Earth is than the moon,” Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, . “Our planet is a truly brilliant object in dark space compared to the lunar surface.” []
The moon’s far side is very different from its well-known front face. Instead of the “Man in the Moon,” whose dark patches formed when craters created by cosmic collisions filled with lava, the far side is all mountains and craters without the dark, flat plains.
These differences probably exist because the far side’s crust is about twice as thick as that on the near side, researchers say. (Heat radiating from the still-scorching Earth shortly after apparently kept the lunar near side molten much longer than the far side; elements therefore condensed out of the moon’s wispy atmosphere more readily on the cooler far side.)
No comments:
Post a Comment