MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Contact:
Guy Webster, JPL, (818) 354-6278
Lori Stiles, University of Arizona, (520) 626-4402

The highly volcanic moon Io hangs like a golden ornament in front of Jupiter in one of the new images available from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The picture was taken Dec. 12.

Another newly released image is a set of 10 frames showing a portion of Jupiter's main ring. The frames were taken over a period spanning 39.5 hours, beginning Dec. 11, and were processed to make the very faint ring more visible.

The images are available 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.