Cassini’s First Color Movie of Jupiter Shows Bustling Activity

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011

Contact: Guy Webster, JPL, (818) 354-6278

VIDEO ADVISORY

Orange and white stripes slide against each other, and huge
oval storms gyrate in the NASA’s Cassini spacecraft’s first color
movie clip of Jupiter.

The 24-frame clip shows what it would look like to unpeel
the entire globe of Jupiter, stretch it out on a wall in the form
of a rectangular map, and watch its atmosphere evolve with time.

The Jupiter clip is scheduled to air on NASA Television
today at, 3 p.m., 6 p.m., 9 p.m. and midnight, all times Eastern
Standard Time. NASA Television is broadcast on GE-2, transponder
9C, C-Band, located at 85 degrees West longitude. The frequency
is 3880.0 MHz. Polarization is vertical and audio is monaural at
6.8 MHz. For general questions about the NASA Video File,
contact: Fred Brown, NASA Television, Washington, D.C. (202) 358-
0713.

The clip is available online from NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., at

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/jupiter

and from the web site of the Cassini Imaging Science team at the
University of Arizona, Tucson, at

http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/.

Cassini will pass Jupiter at a distance of about 9.7 million
kilometers (6 million miles) on Dec. 30. The spacecraft will use
a boost from Jupiter’s gravity to reach its ultimate destination,
Saturn, in July 2004. Additional information from collaborative
studies of Jupiter by Cassini and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft is
available online at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jupiterflyby .

Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space
Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the Cassini and
Galileo missions for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington,
D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena.