PIA00015: Large Brown Oval

Target Name: Jupiter Is a satellite of: Sol (our sun) Mission: Voyager Spacecraft: Voyager 1 Product Size: 940 samples x 886 lines Produced By: JPL Producer ID: P21194 Addition Date: 1996-01-29 Primary Data Set: Voyager EDRs Full-Res TIFF: PIA00015.tif (1.991 MB) Full-Res JPEG: PIA00015.jpg (54.79 kB)

Original Caption Released with Image: This large brown oval, photographed on March 2 by Voyager 1, is located between 13 and 18` N latitude and may be an opening in the upper cloud deck which, if observed at extremely high resolution, could provide information about deeper, warmer cloud levels; therefore, it has been selected as one of the targets to be photographed on March 5 near closest approach to Jupiter. Features of this sort are not rare on Jupiter and have an average lifetime of one to two years. Above the feature is the pale orange North Temperate Belt, bounded on the south by the high speed North Temperate Current with winds of 120 meters/sec (260 mi/hr). The range to Jupiter at the time this photograph was obtained was 4.0 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) with the smallest resolvable features being 75 kilometers (45 miles) wide. JPL manages and controls the Voyager project for NASA's Office of Space Science. Image Credit: NASA/JPL