Recovered Video From Fairing on DSCOVR Mission
Possible correction: There is some debate as to which launch the recovered fairing came from. I'm leaving in the parts that pertain to the DSCOVR launch unless it's conclusively determined to be from some other launch.
On 11 February of this year, NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) probe launched into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9, on a mission to observe the Earth, watch for changes in various climatic indicators, and provide advance warning of solar activity that could pose a hazard to Earth and Earth-orbit infrastructure. To accomplish this, the Falcon 9 rocket injected it into a trajectory that would take it to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrangian Point.
Normally, objects orbiting the Sun more closely than the Earth will orbit it more quickly -- for example, Venus, which orbits the Sun every 225 days compared to Earth's familiar 365. But at the L1 point, the gravitational attractions of the Earth and Sun balance each other such that any object occupying that point will rotate around the Sun at the same speed as the Earth, taking the same 365 days to complete one orbit. Consequently, any object at the L1 point will remain in the same position relative to the Sun and Earth for the entirety of its orbit. DSCOVR's goal is to observe the Earth from afar, and be in a position to detect solar emissions well before they reach Earth, and being significantly closer to the Sun is a great way to do that. Positioning itself at L1 allows DSCOVR to do that from an unchanging vantage point, without racing ahead of the Earth as most objects closer than it to the Sun would.
As with all of our probes and satellites, DSCOVR is not an aerodynamic body, like a bullet or an airplane. It's a collection of hardware designed to operate in space only. Since ascending into orbit on a rocket entails humongous, stressful aerodynamic forces, DSCOVR would be torn apart if it were directly exposed to the atmosphere during its ride into space. To avoid this, rockets enclose their non-aerodynamic payloads in a very aerodynamic protective shell, called a payload fairing. It's typically an egg or cone-shaped protrusion at the top of the rocket, and it allows the rocket to cut through the air on ascent while protecting the fragile probe within.
DSCOVR's payload fairing on top of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle, with the mission insignia painted on. Credit: NASA
After a certain point during the ascent, the rocket has gotten high enough that the air is so thin as to impart no forces at all. At this point, the payload fairing serves no purpose; there isn't enough air to pose any problem for the payload. It's wasteful to burn propellant to accelerate mass that isn't doing anything useful any more, so the payload fairing is jettisoned to reduce mass. During the DSCOVR launch, this occured at T plus three minutes and forty seconds into the ascent:
Separation of DSCOVR's payload fairing during ascent on the Falcon 9. On the right, a camera mounted behind the payload captures the fairing jettison, exposing the payload to space. On the left, the two halves of the fairing can be faintly seen falling away from the rocket. Credit: Azimuth GIF, SpaceX ascent video
At the point in ascents where payload fairings are usually jettisoned, rockets typically haven't achieved orbital velocity yet. They're usually on a suborbital trajectory -- that is, if they shut down their engines and stopped accelerating at that point, they would fall back down into the atmosphere and to the surface. Payload fairings are no longer accelerating once jettisoned, so they follow this trajectory. Some burn up in the atmosphere, some crash into the ocean.
The fairings from DSCOVR's rocket crashed into the Atlantic ocean after being jettisoned, and after several months, washed ashore in the Bahamas, to be discovered by Kevin Eichelberger and his friends.
Credit:Kevin Eichelberger via Twitter
SpaceX, as it tends to do, had a GoPro camera mounted on the fairing, and posted the video from it after retrieving the fairing from the Bahamanian beach. The video captures the moments in space immediately after being jettisoned from the rocket, and wow, is it gorgeous. The Earth, the Sun, and the rapidly receding rocket are all visible. Be sure to watch in HD.
Update: I've added some annotations to show what you're looking at as the fairing spins around: