page_title: Deep Space Climate Observatory
section_title: Spacecraft
hierarchical_section_title: Deep Space Climate Observatory / Spacecraft
caption_attribution_description: English: Diagram of the Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft.
context_page_description: Deep Space Climate Observatory is a NOAA space weather, space climate, and Earth observation satellite. It was launched by SpaceX on a Falcon 9 launch vehicle on February 11, 2015, from Cape Canaveral. This is NOAA's first operational deep space satellite and became its primary system of warning Earth in the event of solar magnetic storms.
  DSCOVR was originally proposed as an Earth observation spacecraft positioned at the Sun-Earth L₁ Lagrangian point, providing live video of the sunlit side of the planet through the Internet as well as scientific instruments to study climate change. Political changes in the United States resulted in the mission's cancellation, and in 2001 the spacecraft was placed into storage.
  Proponents of the mission continued to push for its reinstatement, and a change in presidential administration in 2009 resulted in DSCOVR being taken out of storage and refurbished, and its mission was refocused to solar observation and early warning of coronal mass ejections while still providing Earth observation and climate monitoring. It launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 11, 2015, and reached L₁ on June 8, 2015.
context_section_description: DSCOVR is built on the SMEX-Lite spacecraft bus and has a launch mass of approximately 570 kg (1,257 lb). The main science instrument sets are the Sun-observing Plasma Magnetometer (PlasMag) and the Earth-observing NIST Advanced Radiometer (NISTAR) and Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). DSCOVR has two deployable solar arrays, a propulsion module, boom, and antenna.
  From its vantage point, DSCOVR monitors variable solar wind conditions, provides early warning of approaching coronal mass ejections and observes phenomena on Earth, including changes in ozone, aerosols, dust and volcanic ash, cloud height, vegetation cover and climate. At its Sun-Earth L₁ location it has a continuous view of the Sun and of the sunlit side of the Earth. After the spacecraft arrived on-site and entered its operational phase, NASA began releasing near-real-time images of Earth through the EPIC instrument's website. DSCOVR takes full-Earth pictures about every two hours and is able to process them faster than other Earth observation satellites.
  The spacecraft orbits the L₁ point in a six-month period, with a spacecraft–Earth–Sun angle varying from 4 to 15°.
caption: Diagram of DSCOVR
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