Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, a storm as wide as two
Earths and more than 300 years old, interrupts the pattern of
horizontal stripes on Jupiter in a new color image of the planet
from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The image was taken from a
distance of about 78 million kilometers (48 million miles) on
Oct. 8. A related panel of three images displays the same side of
Jupiter in three different wavelengths, including ultraviolet and
infrared views that show features not seen in visible light.
The images are available from NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/jupiter
and from the web site of the Cassini Imaging Science team at the
University of Arizona, Tucson, at
http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/ .
Cassini will pass most closely to Jupiter, at about 10
million kilometers (6 million miles) away, on Dec. 30. Images
taken as it approaches and flies past will be used for studies of
atmospheric dynamics, dark rings and other features of Jupiter.
Cassini is passing Jupiter on its way to its ultimate
destination, Saturn.
Additional information about the flyby is available at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jupiterflyby .
Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space
Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the Cassini and
Galileo missions for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington,
D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena.
