Pretty picture: Earth and Moon from JunoCam

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2011/08/30 11:53 CDT

Topics: pretty pictures, Juno, Earth, the Moon

It's always awe-inspiring to see our great world as just a tiny spot within vast space. The latest spacecraft to get such a view of Earth and the Moon is the Jupiter-bound Juno.

NASA / JPL / MSSS

Earth and Moon from Juno

This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) was taken by JunoCam on the Juno spacecraft, three weeks after its August 5 launch. On August 26, 2011, the spacecraft was already almost 10 million kilometers away from the Earth-Moon system.

This is very low-resolution; not much detail is visible from so far out. JunoCam is a pretty wide-angle camera (with a 70-degree field of view) because it's designed to be operated pretty close to Jupiter. I think we'll probably be getting better pictures of Earth and Moon from Juno in two years, when the spacecraft makes a return visit to Earth for a boost onward to Jupiter.

Congratulations to the Juno team on an apparently successful instrument checkout!