The brick red, white and brown cloud bands of Jupiter are seen here from
Saturn orbit. The Cassini spacecraft's powerful imaging cameras were
specially designed to photograph nearby bodies (cosmically speaking) in
the Saturn system, but as this image demonstrates, the cameras are
actually telescopes.
Jupiter is imaged here from more than 11 times the distance between Earth
and the Sun, or slightly farther than the average Earth-Saturn distance.
As demonstrated by PIA08324, Earth is only about a pixel across when viewed
from Saturn by Cassini.
Cassini's parting glance at Jupiter, following the spacecraft's 2000 flyby
and gravity assist, is PIA03451.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 8, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 1.8 billion kilometers (1.1 billion miles) from Jupiter and
at a Sun-Jupiter-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Scale in the
original image was about 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) per pixel. The
image was contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of two and a half to
enhance the visibility of cloud features on the planet.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
