Juice’s September 2026 Earth flyby: the movie

On 28 September 2026, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) successfully completed a gravity assist flyby of Earth. Flight controllers guided the spacecraft close to our home planet to increase its velocity by 3.5 km/s and deflect its trajectory by an angle of 20°.

As Juice flew just 8,640 km above the Indian Ocean, it snapped a series of images with its onboard monitoring cameras, giving a unique “Juice eye view” of Earth. The monitoring cameras provide 1,024 x 1,024 pixel snapshots that can be processed in colour. Their main purpose is to monitor the spacecraft’s various booms and antennas, especially during the challenging period after launch; the Earth photos captured during the flyby are a bonus.

In the first seconds of the video, a view from Juice monitoring camera 2 (JMC2) shows Earth as a thin crescent at the bottom right of the frame. Around 10 seconds in, the view switches to JMC1, with almost the entire disc of Earth visible at the top right; the large land mass seen is Africa. Even the Moon is visible as a tiny grey dot to Earth’s right. At the very end of the video, JMC1 gives a final view of Earth in the distance as Juice flies away on 29 September.