Jupiter shines as a crescent, with a much smaller
crescent moon Io by its side, in a color picture taken by
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft looking back at the Jupiter after
flying past it five months ago.
That “farewell, Jupiter” image plus a color movie clip of
glowing features on Io during an eclipse are now available
online from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif., at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/jupiter
and from the Cassini Imaging Science team at the University of
Arizona, Tucson, at
http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/.
The eclipse movie is being presented at meetings of the
American Geophysical Union in Boston today. In the sequence of
images used to create it, Cassini caught Io’s auroras in
motion and detected emissions at previously unknown
wavelengths. Red glows from oxygen atoms and blue glows from
sulfur dioxide molecules in the images, along with thermal
glows from hot lava at several active volcanoes.
Cassini passed its closest to Jupiter on Dec. 30, 2000,
gaining a gravitational boost for reaching its main
destination, Saturn, in 2004. More information about joint
studies of Jupiter by Cassini and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft,
which has been orbiting Jupiter for more than five years, is
available at http://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.
