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Large Brown Oval

Jan. 29, 1996
This large brown oval, photographed on Mar. 2, 1979 by NASA's Voyager 1. 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.

This large brown oval, photographed on March 2, 1979 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.

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