Jupiter-Bound Space Probe Captures Earth And Moon

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DC Agle 818-393-9011
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Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
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Image advisory: 2011-271 August 30, 2011

Jupiter-Bound Space Probe Captures Earth And Moon

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-271&cid=release_2011-271

PASADENA, Calif. – On its way to the biggest planet in the solar system -- Jupiter, NASA's Juno
spacecraft took time to capture its home planet and its 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."

The image was taken by the spacecraft's camera, JunoCam, on Aug. 26 when the spacecraft was
about 6 million miles (9.66 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 the
spacecraft's instruments and subsystems after its launch on Aug. 5.

Juno covered the distance from Earth to the moon (about 250,000 miles or 402,000 kilometers) in
less than one day's time. It will take the spacecraft another five years and 1,740 million miles (2,800
million kilometers) to complete the journey to Jupiter. The 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.

The solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at
9:25 a.m. PDT (12:25 p.m. EDT) on Aug. 5 to begin its five-year journey to Jupiter.

JPL 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 . You can follow the mission on Twitter at
http://www.twitter.com/nasajuno .

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