That’s no moon – it’s the Moon 🌗
The first colour images from ESA JUICE’s close lunar encounter last night are out.
Taken by the monitoring cameras, both show sunlit craters & shadows on the surface with parts of the spacecraft in the foreground.
At the top of the second image, you can just make out Earth as a small dark circle, surrounded by the ring of its backlit atmosphere.
We arrive (t)here tonight 🛰️🌏
Kudos to @stim3on for the magical processing 🙇♂️
For more detail & to download the images, here are the ESA releases this morning:
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/08/Juice_snaps_Moon_en_route_to_Earth
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/08/Earth_ahead
If you’re having trouble spotting Earth in that second picture, here’s a handy guide I just made.
It’s small, because it’s 400,000km away still at this point, but once you see it, it’s obvious.
And we’ll be muuuuuch closer tonight 😱
FWIW, the two JUICE monitoring cameras, made by Micro-Cameras & Space Exploration in Switzerland under contract to Airbus for ESA, use an unconventional RYGB Bayer filter over their 1024 x 1024 pixel detectors, optimised for planetary imagery.
Compared to a standard DSLR RGGB Bayer filter, that made for a huge amount of custom calibration & clever processing by @stim3on last night at ESOC.
So huge credit to him for his efforts.
Armed with that experience, we’re ready for tonight’s flyby at Earth, where the colour processing will be much more important than at the Moon 🙂
But due to the geometry of the flyby & the fact that JUICE will be out of radio contact for several hours during it, we’ll only get the images much later, close to 5am.
So bear with us ✌️
All images will be freely available later too 👍
Mark McCaughrean