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Juno's Post-launch view of Earth and Moon

Aug. 6, 2011
This image of Earth (at left) and the moon (at right) was taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft as part of a checkout of the probe's instruments following launch.

This image of Earth (at left) and the moon (at right) was taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft as part of a checkout of the probe's instruments following launch.

The image was captured by the spacecraft's camera, JunoCam, on Aug. 26, 2011, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) from Earth. JunoCam is a wide-angle camera, designed to acquire color images of Jupiter from very close to the planet.

Following its launch on Aug. 5, 2011, Juno covered the distance from Earth to the moon (about 250,000 miles or 402,000 kilometers) in less than one day's time.

The spacecraft will orbit the planet's poles 33 times and use its 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.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.

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