Juice images Earth during lunar-Earth flyby
During the second step of humankind’s first-ever lunar-Earth flyby, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) captured this stunning view of Earth. The image covers the northern Pacific Ocean, with North America starting to appear on the right (east) side of the Earth image.
The image was taken by Juice monitoring camera 1 (JMC1) just at 00:09 CEST on 21 August 2024, as Juice was heading away from its closest approach to Earth. This successful flyby of Earth redirected Juice’s path through space to put it on course for a flyby of Venus in August 2025.
The Juice monitoring cameras were designed to monitor the spacecraft’s various booms and antennas, especially during the challenging deployment period following launch.
They were not designed to carry out science or image the Moon and Earth. A scientific camera called JANUS is providing high-resolution imagery during the cruise phase flybys of Earth, Moon and Venus, and of Jupiter and its icy moons once in the Jupiter system in 2031.
JMC1 is located on the front* of the spacecraft and looks diagonally up into a field of view that sees deployed antennas, and depending on their orientation, part of one of the solar arrays. JMC images provide 1024 x 1024 pixel snapshots. The images shown here are lightly processed by Simeon Schmauß and Mark McCaughrean.
Guide to Juice’s monitoring cameras
More information on the lunar-Earth flyby
Rewatch the livestream of Juice’s first Moon images, including Q&A with the team
More images from Juice's monitoring cameras in ESA's Planetary Science Archive
*Additional technical information: ‘front’ means +X side of the spacecraft (the opposite side, -X hosts the high gain antenna). JMC1 looks towards the +Y/+Z direction.
Processing notes: In each case, two images of different exposures have been added to increase the details in the shadows.
The Juice monitoring cameras were developed by Switzerland-based company Micro-Cameras & Space Exploration.
[Image description: Half of Earth visible to the lower left of the image. A spacecraft partially visible on the right.]
