The European probe has captured a spectacular photo of the Earth, the Moon and a surprise planetary host.
At the European probe JUICE captured a spectacular view of Earth, the Moon and a surprise planetary guest. The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission, which launched, captured a spectacular photo of Earth, its moon and Uranus, which, like Jupiter, is a gas giant. The celestial trio was photographed by JUICE as the space probe headed towards Venus for its second gravitational “slingshot”, expected in 2025. “These two little marbles that we call our cosmic home were photographed by JUICE from over 5 million km, while the probe greeted us heading towards Venus,” ESA wrote in a post on X.
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Gravitational slingshot: what it is and how it works
is a maneuver in which a spacecraft uses the gravity of one celestial body to push it towards another. The Venus flyby, along with Earth and Moon flybys, will help JUICE reach the Jupiter system in 2031. In August, JUICE performed a first-of-its-kind Earth-Moon gravitational slingshot. It gave the spacecraft an extra boost on its way to Venus. After visiting the second planet from the Sun, the spacecraft will complete two more Earth flybys in 2026 and 2029. Both without the additional push of the Moon.
JUICE’s selfie
“An overexposed image also revealed , which was 2.9 billion km away from JUICE,” ESA officials wrote in the X post. The new images were taken using different exposure times as part of flight tests and calibrations of the spacecraft’s two tracking cameras. The cameras offer different fields of view and are responsible for monitoring the spacecraft’s instruments in flight.
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