This image of the Earth was acquired by the JunoCam camera onboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft during its Earth flyby gravity assist on October 9, 2013. South America fills the view, although part of the cloud-covered Antarctic is visible at bottom.
The image was acquired at 19:08 UT when the spacecraft was at an altitude of 3,567 miles (5,741 kilometers).
The purpose of JunoCam is to provide images of Jupiter for public engagement. The Juno team plans to provide opportunities for the public to be directly involved with choosing what to image and with image processing the image data while Juno is at Jupiter. The image processing premise was tested at Earth by releasing the raw image data to the public less than a week after the images were acquired. This color image was constructed from individual red, green and blue frames at unmannedspaceflight.com.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech