ESA’s Juice spacecraft imaged on its way to the fly-by with the Earth: image and animation – 10-11 Aug. 2024.
We spotted the ESA’s Juice spacecraft again, ready to its fly-by with the Earth next 20 Aug. and going to explore the icy satellites of Jupiter, reaching it in 2031. We present our image and time-lapse.
The Juice spacecraft, imaged on 10 Aug. 2024.
The image above comes from the average of 11, 120-second exposures, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″ + Paramount MEII + SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project. The telescope tracked Juice’s apparent motion, this is why stars look like short trails while the probe is a sharp dot of light, indicated by a grey arrow.
The fly-by will be on 20 Aug., around 22 UTC, with the spacecraft at the minimum distance from our planet (about 13200km from its center, about 6900km from its surface).
Using a few images of Juice taken back to back, we managed to create a time-lapse, showing the motion of the probe, as in the animation below:
Time-lapse with the Juice spacecraft.
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