Full Jupiter Mosaic
Date: 10 Feb 2007

This image of Jupiter is produced from a 2x2 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 10 February 2007, when the spacecraft was 29 million km (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 km (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."


At the time LORRI took these images, New Horizons was 820 million km (510 million miles) from home -- nearly 5½ times the distance between the sun and Earth. This is the last full-disk image of Jupiter LORRI produced, after this the imager focused on specific areas of the planet for higher-resolution studies.


Last Update: 13 Dec 2011 (AMB)

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute