On 28 September 2026, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) successfully completed a gravity assist flyby of Earth. Flight controllers guided the spacecraft close to our home planet to increase its velocity by 3.5 km/s and deflect its trajectory by an angle of 20°.
As Juice flew just 8640 km above the Indian Ocean, it snapped a series of images with its onboard monitoring cameras, giving us a unique ‘Juice eye view’ of our home planet.
Juice’s monitoring cameras provide 1024 x 1024 pixel snapshots that can be processed in colour. Their main purpose is to monitor the spacecraft’s various booms and antennas, especially during the challenging period after launch. The photos they captured of Earth during the flyby are a bonus.
In the first seconds of the video we see a view from Juice monitoring camera 2 – or JMC2 – with Earth appearing as a thin crescent at the bottom right of the frame. Around 10 seconds in, we switch to a view from JMC1, with almost the entire disc of Earth visible at the top right of the frame. The large land mass that we see is Africa. Even the Moon is visible as a tiny grey dot to Earth’s right. At the very end of the video, JMC1 gives us a final view of Earth in the distance as it flies away on 29 September.
Read more about the flyby
Read more about Juice’s monitoring cameras