Earth Triptych from NASA’s Juno Spacecraft

This trio of Junocam views of Earth was taken during Juno's close flyby on October 9, 2013.

The leftmost view shows the southern two-thirds of South America. As the spacecraft moved eastward during its flyby, the Chilean coast and the snowy line of the Andes Mountains recedes toward the limb at left on the planet. The third image includes a view of the Argentinean coastline with reflections, or specular highlights, off the Rio Negro north of Golfo San Matias, as well as cloud formations over Antarctica.

The leftmost view was obtained at 19:08 UT at an altitude of 3,567 miles (5,741 kilometers); the center view was obtained at 19:11 from 2,486 miles (4,001 kilometers) altitude, and the view at right was obtained at 19:12 UT at an altitude of 1,986 miles (3,197 kilometers).

The center image was taken using Junocam's narrowband methane filter, while the other two are combinations of the instrument's red, green and blue filters and approximate natural color. Each image is a mosaic of 82 individual frames taken as the spacecraft spun; these have been composited and remapped by ground processing.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.