Fly over Africa with Juice
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) skimmed the very outer edge of Earth’s atmosphere on 28 September, using the gravity of our home planet to alter its route to Jupiter using very little fuel. You can read more about this flyby here.
At its closest approach, at 13:45 CEST (11:45 UTC), Juice flew just 8640 km above the Indian Ocean. From 13:46–13:50 CEST, its science camera recorded a series of photos of Earth as our planet turned below it.
The result is shown here: a strip roughly 250–300 km wide, from east of Madagascar across Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola to the Gulf of Guinea. The pixel size grows from about 150 m over Madagascar to about 375 m over the Atlantic as Juice moved away.
This image is interactive. You can zoom and pan across the image, or click on the circle markers to explore interesting features.
The camera, called JANUS, has 13 colour filters, three of which were used in this image strip. About 40 red, green and blue frames were placed on a map grid using the spacecraft's position and pointing. Overlapping frames are blended smoothly. The three colours are scaled together, so the colours stay close to what the eye would see, including the slight blue haze from the atmosphere. The background map is from Natural Earth.
This flight past Earth was the perfect testing opportunity for Juice’s science instruments. JANUS operated for five days, from 27 September at 23:00 CEST (21:00 UTC) to 2 October at 10:40 CEST (8:40 UTC). It acquired a total of 740 images of Earth and the Moon, using all 13 instrument filters and with different spatial resolution on the ground along the flyby.
Read more in the press releases from INAF and DLR
JANUS is a multicolour optical camera designed to take detailed, high-resolution photos of Jupiter and its icy moons. It was developed by an industrial consortium led by Leonardo SpA, under the supervision of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and in collaboration with the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), which is responsible for instrument science, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), CSIC-IAA in Granada (Spain) and CEI-Open University in Milton Keynes (UK).
[Image description: A curved image strip of satellite images is overlaid on a map of part of Africa. The strip traverses from east of Madagascar across Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola to the Gulf of Guinea. At the time, it was sunny with small clouds over Madagascar and the Mozambique channel, while cloud cover increases to the west, being thickest over Angola. The cloud cover ends at the continent's west coast. Zooming in to the image, you can also see many rivers, red earth and green patches across Madagascar, Juan de Nova island in the Mozambique channel, the Meluli River snaking across Mozambique towards the coast, and the southern part of Lake Malawi.]
