Pasadena, CA--A few days after its launch, the Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft turned its camera back toward its origin to take this image of the Earth and its moon. The NASA spacecraft's camera, JunoCam, captured the image on Aug. 26 when the spacecraft was just shy of 10 million kilometers away.
The image was taken as part of the mission team's checkout of the Juno spacecraft. The team is conducting its initial detailed checks on Juno's instruments and subsystems after its launch on Aug. 5. It will take Juno another five years and 2800 million kilometers to complete the journey to Jupiter.
Juno's primary mission will last through 33 orbits of Jupiter; the eight science instruments aboard will probe beneath the gas giant's obscuring cloud cover to learn more about its origins, structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core. The Kodak KAI-2020 image sensor, which has a 1600 x 1200 pixel array, will enable JunoCam to acquire images of Jupiter’s cloud tops at a maximum resolution of 3 km per pixel. The camera will capture images for at least seven orbits, and then continue operation as long as possible in Jupiter’s intense radiation environment.
For more info, see http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.
