New Territory West of the Great Red Spot

Turbulent region west of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. This four image mosaic shows the Great Red Spot on Jupiter's eastern edge or limb. The images have been re-projected onto a square grid of latitude and longitude lines. The upper left tile of the four-tile mosaic is in green (559 nm) light, while the rest are in violet (415 nm). Variations in brightness between the images are due to the different filters and exposure times used in this observation.

The region west of the Great Red Spot is characterized by large, turbulent structures that rotate clockwise, in the opposite sense of the Great Red Spot. The centers of some of these structures are extremely bright, and may be giant (2000 km) clusters of cumulus clouds. Regions of large-scale turbulence are rare in Jupiter's otherwise very stable and organized atmosphere. North is to the top. Each pixel subtends a square about 29.5 kilometers on a side. The images were obtained on June 26, 1996 by the Solid State Imaging system on board NASA's Galileo spacecraft.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC.

This image and other images and data received from Galileo are posted on the World Wide Web, on the Galileo mission home page at URL http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov. Background information and educational context for the images can be found at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sepo.