Views of Jupiter
SOURCE : http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/07/views_of_jupiter.html
Jupiter is in the news again, this time because its "Baby Red Spot" - a
storm less than a year old - appears to have been swallowed up by the
massive storm known as the Great Red Spot. This is good occasion to
share some of the best photographs of Jupiter and its larger system of
rings and moons, as seen by various probes and telescopes over the past
30 years
Jupiter's moon Io floats above the cloudtops of Jupiter in this image
captured January 1, 2001. The image is deceiving: there are 350,000
kilometers - roughly 2.5 Jupiters - between Io and Jupiter's clouds. Io
is about the size of our own moon (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
This image of Jupiter's moon Europa rising above Jupiter was captured by
the New Horizons spacecraft in February just after it passed Jupiter on
its way to Pluto and the outer Solar System. (NASA, Johns Hopkins U.
APL, SWRI)
The gibbous phase of Jupiter's moon Europa. The robot spacecraft Galileo
captured this image mosaic during its mission orbiting Jupiter from
1995 - 2003. Evidence and images from the Galileo spacecraft, indicated
that liquid oceans might exist below the icy surface. (Galileo Project,
JPL, NASA; reprocessed by Ted Stryk)
This view of the icy surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa, is a mosaic of
two pictures taken by the Solid State Imaging system on board the
Galileo spacecraft during a close flyby of Europa on February 20, 1997.
The area shown is about 14 kilometers by 17 kilometers (8.7 miles by
10.6 miles), and has a resolution of 20 meters (22 yards) per pixel. One
of the youngest features seen in this area is the double ridge cutting
across the picture from the lower left to the upper right. This double
ridge is about 2.6 kilometers (1.6 miles) wide and stands some 300
meters (330 yards) high. (NASA/JPL/ASU)
A composite of several images taken in several colors by the New
Horizons Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera, or MVIC, illustrating the
diversity of structures in Jupiter's atmosphere, in colors similar to
what someone "riding" on New Horizons would see. It was taken near the
terminator, the boundary between day and night, and shows relatively
small-scale, turbulent, whirlpool-like structures near the south pole of
the planet. The dark "holes" in this region are actually places where
there is very little cloud cover, so sunlight is not reflected back to
the camera. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)
This image, acquired during Galileo's ninth orbit around Jupiter, shows
two volcanic plumes on Io. One plume was captured on the bright limb or
edge of the moon, erupting over a caldera (volcanic depression) named
Pillan Patera. The plume seen by Galileo is 140 kilometers (86 miles)
high, and was also detected by the Hubble Space Telescope. The second
plume, seen near the terminator, the boundary between day and night, is
called Prometheus. The shadow of the airborne plume can be seen
extending to the right of the eruption vent. (NASA/JPL/University of
Arizona)
A part of the southern hemisphere of Io, seen by the spacecraft Voyager
at a range of 74,675 km. In the foreground is gently undulating
topography, while in the back-ground are two mountains with their near
faces brightly illuminated by the sun. The mountain in the right is
approximately 150 km across at its base and its height is probably in
excess of 15 km which would make it higher than any mountain on Earth.
(NASA/JPL)
This five-frame sequence of New Horizons images captures the giant plume
from Io's Tvashtar volcano. Snapped by the probe's Long Range
Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft flew past Jupiter
earlier this year, this first-ever "movie" of an Io plume clearly shows
motion in the cloud of volcanic debris, which extends 330 kilometers
(200 miles) above the moon's surface. Only the upper part of the plume
is visible from this vantage point - the plume's source is 130
kilometers (80 miles) below the edge of Io's disk, on the far side of
the moon. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)
A volcanic plume rises over 300 kilometers above the horizon of
Jupiter's moon Io in this image from cameras onboard the New Horizons
spacecraft. The volcano, Tvashtar, is marked by the bright glow (about 1
o'clock) at the moon's edge, beyond the terminator or night/day shadow
line. The shadow of Io cuts across the plume itself. Also capturing
stunning details on the dayside surface, the high resolution image was
recorded when the spacecraft was 2.3 million kilometers from Io. Later
it was combined with lower resolution color data by astro-imager Sean
Walker to produce this sharp portrait of the solar system's most active
moon. (NASA, JHU/APL, SwRI - Additional Processing: Sean Walker)
Jupiter's moon Io, seen by NASA's Galileo spacecraft against a backdrop
of Jupiter's cloud tops, which appear blue in this false-color
composite. (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
A mosaic of Jupiter's ring system, acquired by NASA's Galileo spacecraft
when the Sun was behind the planet, and the spacecraft was in Jupiter's
shadow peering back toward the Sun. (NASA/JPL/Cornell University)
The first color movie of Jupiter from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows
what it would look like to peel the entire globe of Jupiter, stretch it
out on a wall into the form of a rectangular map, and watch its
atmosphere evolve with time. The brief movie clip spans 24 Jupiter
rotations between Oct. 31 and Nov. 9, 2000. The darker blips that appear
are several moons and their shadows. (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
An image of the leading hemisphere of Ganymede seen by NASA's Galileo
spacecraft. Many fragmented regions of dark terrain split by lanes of
bright grooved terrain cover the surface. Several bright young craters
can be seen, including a linear chain of craters near the center of the
image which may have resulted from the impact of a fragmented comet,
similar to comet Shoemaker-Levy/9 which hit Jupiter in 1994.
(NASA/JPL/Brown University)
The area of Nicholson Regio and Arbela Sulcus illustrates many of the
diverse terrain types on Jupiter's moon Ganymede, as seen in this image
taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. The image covers an area
approximately 89 by 26 kilometers (55by 16 miles). (NASA/JPL/Brown
University)
Jupiter's Great Red seen by NASA's Voyager spacecraft. July, 1979 Around
the northern boundary a white cloud is seen, which extends to east of
the region. The presence of this cloud prevents small cloud vortices
from circling the spot in the manner seen in the Voyager 1 encounter.
Another white oval cloud (different from the one present in this
position three months ago) is seen south of the Great Red Spot. This
image was taken on July 6, 1979 from a range of 2,633,003 kilometers.
The Red Spot is 20,000 km across. (NASA/JPL)
This true color mosaic of Jupiter was constructed from images taken by
the narrow angle camera onboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft on December
29, 2000, as the spacecraft neared Jupiter during its flyby of the giant
planet. It is the most detailed global color portrait of Jupiter ever
produced. Although Cassini's camera can see more colors than humans can,
Jupiter here looks the way that the human eye would see it.
(NASA/JPL/SSI)
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