This image of Jupiter is produced from a 2x2 mosaic of photos taken by the
New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), and assembled by
the LORRI team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
The telescopic camera snapped the images during a 3-minute, 35-second span
on February 10, when the spacecraft was 29 million kilometers (18 million
miles) from Jupiter. At this distance, Jupiter's diameter was 1,015 LORRI
pixels -- nearly filling the imager's entire (1,024-by-1,024 pixel) field
of view. Features as small as 290 kilometers (180 miles) are visible.
Both the Great Red Spot and Little Red Spot are visible in the image, on
the left and lower right, respectively. The apparent "storm" on the
planet's right limb is a section of the south tropical zone that has been
detached from the region to its west (or left) by a "disturbance" that
scientists and amateur astronomers are watching closely.
At the time LORRI took these images, New Horizons was 820 million
kilometers (510 million miles) from home -- nearly 5½ times the distance
between the Sun and Earth. This is the last full-disk image of Jupiter
LORRI will produce, since Jupiter is appearing larger as New Horizons
draws closer, and the imager will start to focus on specific areas of the
planet for higher-resolution studies.
