NASA's Juno video shows a starship's view of Earth and the moon
Source: NBC
A new video shows Earth and the moon whirling through space, as seen by NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft in October.
"If Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise said, 'Take us home, Scotty,' this is what the crew would see," the Southwest Research Institute's Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the $1.1 billion Juno mission, said in a NASA news release. “In the movie, you ride aboard Juno as it approaches Earth and then soars off into the blackness of space. No previous view of our world has ever captured the heavenly waltz of Earth and moon."
This clip even has an original score — by the composer Vangelis, no less.
Pale blue dot
Ever since its launch in 2011, Juno has been making its way to a 2016 encounter with Jupiter. To get there, the bus-sized spacecraft took advantage of a gravitational slingshot maneuver on Oct. 9 that came within 350 miles (560 kilometers) of Earth's surface. The two-minute video released on Tuesday shows the view from four cameras that are mounted near the tip of one of Juno's solar arrays. The cameras are designed to track faint stars and get the right orientation for Juno's magnetic-field sensors. In October, they were pressed into duty to watch Earth pass by.
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