Cassini's Sleighful of Jupiter Pictures: Golden Ornament, Silvery Ring

Cassini's Sleighful of Jupiter Pictures: Golden Ornament, Silvery Ring

December 20, 2000

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.

Additional information about Cassini is available online at:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

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.

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Telephone (818) 354-5011