NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Captures New Earth-Moon Image

As part of an engineering test, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured this image of the Earth and Moon using its NavCam1 imager on January 17 from a distance of 39.5 million miles (63.6 million km). When the camera acquired the image, the spacecraft was moving away from home at a speed of 19,000 miles per hour (8.5 kilometers per second).

Earth is the largest, brightest spot in the center of the image, with the smaller, dimmer Moon appearing to the right. Several constellations are also visible in the surrounding space. The bright cluster of stars in the upper left corner is the Pleiades in the Taurus constellation. Hamal, the brightest star in Aries, is located in the upper right corner of the image. The Earth-Moon system is centered in the middle of five stars comprising the head of Cetus the Whale.

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NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is currently on track to catch a portion of an asteroid, has returned an impressive image of Earth and Moon in the process. The spacecraft took the image on October 2, 2017, just after it made a flyby of Earth, although the image has just been launched by NASA. At this time, the Moon was about 390,000 kilometers from Earth.

OSIRIS-REx took this image from a distance of more than 5 million kilometers from Earth, or more than 13 times the Earth-Moon distance. It was taken by combining three images of different color wavelengths. The moon lit up to make it more visible. The spacecraft was launched on September 8, 2016 but, to achieve its goal, it orbited the Sun for a year before flying beyond Earth. He made his closest approach to our planet (an altitude of 17,000 kilometers) on September 22, 2017, and took this picture 10 days later.

This will give you enough speed to get to Bennu, and the ship will meet with the asteroid in August 2018 at a distance of 320 million kilometers from Earth. In total, the ship will travel more than seven billion kilometers to reach Bennu.