Juice’s navigation camera gets first taste of space

NavCam will be vital for steering Juice around Jupiter’s icy moons. Juice will complete a record 35 flybys of moons Ganymede, Europa and Callisto, requiring extremely precise navigation.

To achieve such a high level of precision so far away from Earth, navigation from ground-based antennas will not be sufficient. So as Juice travels past each icy moon, NavCam will snap images for Juice to process on board and refine its trajectory accordingly.

Though NavCam was not needed for navigating around our home planet this week, the lunar-Earth flyby provided a great opportunity to test it out. ESA’s flight dynamics team could practice operating the camera, and ESA scientists could get beautiful photos of the Moon and Earth that complement those from the Juice monitoring cameras.

Like the monitoring cameras, NavCam was not designed as a scientific instrument that would take high-resolution images, especially not of the Moon and Earth. These are a bonus!

It’s important to note that the images below are raw, uncalibrated and unprocessed.

In these NavCam images of the Moon we see interesting features like impact craters and lava fields. Click on the images to find out more.

The top image focuses on the horizon (‘limb’) of the Moon. Juice will take very similar images of Jupiter’s moons, using the shape of their limbs to help navigate itself. This image was taken from above a point very close to the Apollo 11 landing site.

The bottom image covers an area very close to Langrenus crater, captured this week by Juice monitoring camera 1.

These NavCam images of Earth were taken as Juice flew over the Pacific Ocean.

NavCam was built by Sodern, under contract from Airbus, Juice’s prime contractor. It forms part of Juice’s image-based navigation system, designed by Airbus.