While DSCOVR's primary mission is monitoring the solar wind, its EPIC instrument provides full-disk views of the Earth, sometimes capturing the moon as it passes between the Earth and the spacecraft.

A space weather and Earth observation satellite that has been offline for more than three months could be restored to normal operations with new software, but that fix is not expected to be completed until early next year.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...