On route to Jupiter, the largest planet, NASA's Juno spacecraft pictured Earth and the Moon. The image was taken by the spacecraft's camera, JunoCam, on 26 August 2011, when the spacecraft was approximately 10 million km from Earth. The image was taken as part of the mission team's examination of the Juno spacecraft. The team is performing its initial detailed tests on the Juno's instruments, following its launch on 5 August 2011.
"This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator. "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."
Juno traversed the distance from Earth to the Moon (about 402,000 km) in under one day. It will travel 2.8 billion km, to reach Jupiter, in July 2016. The spacecraft will enter orbit around the massive planet, and apply eight science instruments, to probe beneath its obscuring cloud cover to learn more about its formation, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere, and look for a possible solid planetary core. The mission is scheduled to be about one year long, during which Juno will orbit Jupiter 33 times.
References
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
www.jpl.nasa.gov/
Wikipedia
Further Reading
Juno Mission Homepage
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html