The highly volcanic moon Io hangs like a golden ornament
in front of Jupiter in one of the new images available from
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The picture was taken Dec. 12.
Another newly released image is a set of 10 frames
showing a portion of Jupiter’s main ring. The frames were
taken over a period spanning 39.5 hours, beginning Dec. 11,
and were processed to make the very faint ring more visible.
The images are available 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 Jupiter at a distance of about 9.7
million kilometers (6 million miles) on Dec. 30. The
spacecraft will use a boost from Jupiter’s gravity to reach
its ultimate destination, Saturn, in July 2004. Additional
information from collaborative studies of Jupiter by Cassini
and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft is available online 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.
