Storms and Moons
Date: 24 Jan 2007

The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took this 2-millisecond exposure of Jupiter at 04:41:04 UTC on 24 January 2007. The spacecraft was 57 million km (35.3 million miles) from Jupiter, closing in on the giant planet at 66,790 km (41,500 miles) per hour. At right are the moons Io (bottom) and Ganymede; Ganymede's shadow creeps toward the top of Jupiter's northern hemisphere.


Two of Jupiter's largest storms are visible; the Great Red Spot on the western (left) limb of the planet, trailing the Little Red Spot on the eastern limb, at slightly lower latitude. The Great Red Spot is a 300-year old storm more than twice the size of Earth. The Little Red Spot, which formed over the past decade from the merging of three smaller storms, is about half the size of its older and "greater" counterpart.


Last Update: 7 Dec 2011 (AMB)

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