Status Report

New Horizons Image: Full Jupiter Mosaic

By SpaceRef Editor
February 14, 2007
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This image of Jupiter is produced from a 2×2 mosaic of photos taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), and assembled by the LORRI team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The telescopic camera snapped the images during a 3-minute, 35-second span on February 10, when the spacecraft was 29 million kilometers (18 million miles) from Jupiter. At this distance, Jupiter’s diameter was 1,015 LORRI pixels – nearly filling the imager’s entire (1,024-by-1,024 pixel) field of view. Features as small as 290 kilometers (180 miles) are visible.

Both the Great Red Spot and Little Red Spot are visible in the image, on the left and lower right, respectively. The apparent “storm” on the planet’s right limb is a section of the south tropical zone that has been detached from the region to its west (or left) by a “disturbance” that scientists and amateur astronomers are watching closely.

At the time LORRI took these images, New Horizons was 820 million kilometers (510 million miles) from home – nearly 5

SpaceRef staff editor.