Credit: NASA/JPL/SwRI
Okay, I know, you’ve got to look hard. But you’re seeing a unique snapshot in space and time!
NASA’s Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft has captured its home planet launch pad and our natural satellite — the Moon.
“This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves,” he noted in a just-issued press statement.
At the time the photo was snapped, Juno was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. The image was taken as part of the mission team’s checkout of the spacecraft.
The solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on August 5th to begin its five-year journey to Jupiter.
Once at Jupiter, the Juno spacecraft will orbit the planet’s poles 33 times and use its eight science instruments to 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.
More on the Juno mission can be found at:
and
For you Twitter technologists, go to:
http://www.twitter.com/nasajuno
By Leonard David