When the Juno spacecraft passed the Earth and Moon on the way to Jupiter, there were a bunch of cameras snapping pictures of our pale blue dot from space. Today NASA released video from the Advanced Stellar Compass (ASC), a low-light camera used as a navigation tool, that shows the Earth getting bigger and bigger as Juno zooms by.
We say “zooms by,” but of course, space is really mind-bogglingly big, and the journey took a lot longer than this sped-up footage would suggest. The above footage begins at 2:00 UTC on Oct. 6, when the spacecraft was about 2.1 million miles from Earth, and ends at 17:35 UTC Oct. 9, when Juno was just 47,000 miles  above the Earth’s surface. During that time, it received a boost in speed of 8,800 mph, which will help it get to Jupiter on July 4, 2016.
(via Universe Today)
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Published: Dec 10, 2013 07:00 pm