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

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.