Jupiter's Equatorial Region in the Near-Infrared and Violet (Time Set 2)

Mosaics of an equatorial "hotspot" on Jupiter at 756 nanometers (top) and 410 nanometers (bottom). The mosaics cover an area of 34,000 kilometers by 11,000 kilometers. The dark region near the center of each mosaic is an equatorial "hotspot" similar to the Galileo Probe entry site. These features are holes in the bright, reflective, equatorial cloud layer where warmer thermal emission from Jupiter's deep atmosphere can pass through. The circulation patterns observed here along with the composition measurements from the Galileo Probe suggest that dry air may be converging and sinking over these regions, maintaining their cloud-free appearance.

The 756 nanometer (nm) near-infrared continuum filter shows the features of Jupiter's main visible cloud deck. Light at 410 nm is affected by the sizes and compositions of cloud particles, as well as the trace chemicals that give Jupiter's clouds their colors. Near-infrared continuum images are used to study cloud patterns and motions. Violet images contain additional information about cloud color and cloud particles.

North is at the top. The mosaics cover latitudes 1 to 10 degrees and are centered at longitude 336 degrees West. The smallest resolved features are tens of kilometers in size. These images were taken on December 17, 1996, at a range of 1.5 million kilometers by the Solid State Imaging system aboard 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.