NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, currently en route to Saturn, captured the
most detailed global color view of Jupiter ever seen, during its closest
approach to Jupiter.

The Jupiter portrait is available at the Cassini Imaging Team’s website
at http://ciclops.org and the JPL photojournal at
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov.

On December 29, 2000, a little more than a day before the Cassini
spacecraft’s closest approach to Jupiter, its narrow angle camera took a
series of high resolution images at a distance of approximately ten
million kilometers (6.2 million miles), completely covering the planet,
thus allowing the Cassini Imaging Team to produce this global view.

“The imaging team wanted very much to take the ultimate picture of
Jupiter,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “The one that would show
Jupiter in all its intricate and glorious complexity, the one that would
knock your socks off. We managed to wedge this series of images in
among all the pressing scientific observations going on near Cassini’s
closest approach to Jupiter and we’re very glad now that we did.”

The mosaic is constructed from 27 images: nine image locations were
required to cover the entire planet, and each of those locations was
imaged in red, green and blue to provide true color. Although
Cassini’s camera can see more colors than humans can, Jupiter’s colors
in this new view look very close to the way the human eye would see them.

Click on image to enlarge

Clever image processing techniques were used to assemble the images,
taken over the course of an hour’s worth of rotation on Jupiter, into a
seamless mosaic. Each image was first digitally re-positioned and then
re-illuminated to show the planet as it would have appeared at the time
of the first image but under different lighting conditions. The final
product was given a small boost in contrast to enhance visibility of the
planet’s atmospheric features.

“Jupiter really is a planet of clouds,” said Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, a
Cassini imaging team associate and planetary scientist at the University
of California, Los Angeles, who composited the mosaic. “You can stare
for hours at the different forms, patterns, and colors on this image.
Bright, white thunderstorms punctuate several of Jupiter’s bands, while
the Great Red Spot, a vortex big enough to swallow Earth, leaves a
large, turbulent wake behind it. Jupiter shows us what an atmosphere is
capable of on the grandest scale.”

“These images were taken at a little over ten million kilometers (6.2
million miles) from Jupiter, but once we get into orbit at Saturn, the
spacecraft’s distance from Saturn never gets as large as that, so our
images taken in the Saturnian system should be absolutely spectacular,”
said Robert Mitchell, Cassini project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The Cassini spacecraft, currently en route to Saturn, will reach
Saturn’s orbit on July 1, 2004, and release its piggybacked Huygens
probe about six months later for descent through the thick atmosphere of
the moon Titan. The probe could impact in what may be a liquid methane
ocean.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative mission of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission
for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

Additional information about Cassini-Huygens is online at
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

The Space Science Institute is a non-profit organization of scientists
and educators engaged in research in the areas of astrophysics,
planetary science and the earth sciences, and in integrating research
with education and public outreach.