So NASA added instruments to measure the solar wind and radiant energy coming from Earth.īut then Gore lost an election to George W. 'They certainly wanted to make it a more scientifically viable project than, maybe, was envisioned initially by Mr. Launius, now associate director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, was NASA's chief historian when Gore proposed Triana. NASA was game to build and launch Triana, but Roger Launius says the space agency officials weren't crazy about the idea of a satellite that only had one instrument on board. Any satellite 'parked' there has a relatively stable orbit that requires few corrections. The space probe, originally dubbed Triana, would point a telescope with a color camera back at our planet from L1, and send images down to Earth.Īt the L1 Lagrange point (approximately a million miles from Earth), the gravitational forces between the sun and Earth are balanced. So he proposed sending a probe to a spot a million miles from Earth - a place known as the L1 Lagrange point, where the gravity of the Earth and the sun cancel each other out. 'Wouldn't it be nice,' Gore asked in 1998, 'to have that image continuous, live, 24 hours a day?' Gore was so smitten with the view of Earth from space that he put an enormous print of a picture taken by Apollo 17 on the wall of his West Wing office. It's a mission with an unusual history.Īl Gore first proposed the idea for DSCOVR back in 1998, when he was vice president. The images will come courtesy of a spacecraft called Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR).

The three astronauts aboard Apollo 8 were the first to get that view if all goes well, later this year everyone will be able to get it on a daily basis over the Internet. There's something majestic, even awe-inspiring about the sight of planet Earth as a blue disc, hanging in the vastness of space. NASA says this 'blue marble' image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date.

View of earth from space