NASA's Juno satellite was able to capture an "Earth and Moon Dance" video on its way to Jupiter.
"You may remember some years ago that Carl Sagan took a picture he called the Pale Blue Dot, and made a lot of very important points about the fact that everything we know is on this little dot. And I think our movie does the same thing but with a moving image rather than just a still one," said the Chief Scientist of Juno, Dr. Scott Bolton, at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.
Juno is NASA mission to Jupiter to study the giant planet's composition, gravitational and magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere. The mission aims to understand how Jupiter was born and if it has rocks and water in it. The scientists also wanted to know how its deep winds can reach up to 384 mph in speed. The spacecraft is expected to reach its destination by 2016 after almost five years of voyage.
The mission's trajectory gave the scientists an extraordinary opportunity to capture photos as the satellite flies by the Earth. And Juno was able to create a unique sequence of photos of the Earth and Moon doing its cosmic dance, 1,000,000 kilometers away.
The movie, now available for viewing on YouTube, is accompanied by music created by the famous composer Vangelis. It shows the Earth and Moon appearing from the left of the camera, with Earth revolving around its axis whiles the moon transiting at its rear and moving towards the right. The video has already garnered almost 107,000 views as of press time.
Juno was able to capture the scenes through a secondary camera installation usually used for star tracking and navigation. The advantage of using this equipment is that its resolution is low enough to allow movie production using a fair volume of data.
According to John Jorgensen, a scientist and member of the mission team, "The big trick for a low-light camera like this was to tune it in a way that we were able to get images of a very bright object. The camera was designed for operating at the Jupiter system where light is a hundred times fainter than what we can see in this movie."
Bolton believes that the movie sequence must inspire people about how we are placed in the Universe. "Humans can see the Earth and the Moon in motion, doing their cosmic dance. And I think it puts everything into perspective," he told BBC.
See the video below.
