As promised in Issue 761, the ESA spacecraft Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) passed the Earth and Moon the other day, using their gravity to bend its trajectory down toward Venus, where it will steal some of our sister planet’s energy in a gravitational slingshot to boost it toward its eventual destination of Jupiter.

As it passed us it took some fantastic images. I’ll save the best for last…

First, JUICE slid by the Moon on August 19, bending its path slightly so it would be at the right flyby distance from Earth. It took this shot, which shows some features near the Moon’s east side, including Mare Nectaris (the gray patch to the left), Mare Fecunditatis (the bigger gray patch near the center), and several large craters (including Langrenus, the big one at top center, and Humboldt, to the lower right at the day/night line). On the left are parts of the spacecraft itself (the cameras used to take all these shots are not scientific instruments, but smaller ones called JUICE Monitoring Cameras, designed to look at the spacecraft and make sure things are working properly, though obviously they can be used for other purposes as well).

Then, just a day later, JUICE flew past Earth over the Pacific Ocean:

There’s an old-timey Apollo feel to this image. I like the bright glowy patch on the Earth, which is sunlight reflected off the water, amplified due to the geometry of the Sun being behind the spacecraft (called the opposition effect or surge). Off to the extreme right you can just see the western coast of Mexico and the US (Baja California makes it easier to recognize).

But my favorite shot is this one, taken after the rendezvous, as JUICE began the new leg of its journey to Venus:

I love images like this, showing the Earth and Moon together (the Moon is the gray dot on the left; the spacecraft structures are on the right). To be honest, I’m not sure what features we’re seeing on Earth here, and that really struck me: from a distance, Earth is just another planet, one among many in the solar system, and among trillions in the galaxy. We’re used to seeing it in idealized maps or sharp images from low orbit, but from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away even the starkly defined continents and oceans tend to blur together, merging into, simply, Earth.

I’ve felt this way before.

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