Ultraviolet View Shows Jupiter's Stratosphere

Wave patterns at high latitudes, plus the famous Great Red Spot, dominate a cylindrical map of Jupiter as observed by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in the ultraviolet region of the light spectrum.

Compared with familiar visible-light views of Jupiter, this image is missing lower-latitude horizontal stripes of dark and light bands of clouds. (See, for example, PIA02867.) Haze in Jupiter's upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, scatters and reflects ultraviolet wavelengths, but is transparent in the visible-light portion of the spectrum.

This map was assembled from images taken in late 2000 by Cassini's narrow-angle camera. The images were taken during the course of a single Jupiter rotation lasting about 10 hours. The result shows all 360 degrees of Jupiter's longitude. The top edge is at 60 degrees north latitude; the bottom at 60 degrees south latitude.

Cassini made its closest pass to Jupiter, about 10 million kilometers (6 million miles), on Dec. 30, 2000, and proceeded toward its ultimate destination at Saturn. For more information, see the Cassini Project home page, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu. The imaging team is based at the Boulder, Colo., campus of the Southwest Research Institute.

Cassini 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 Cassini mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.