Six spacecraft views of Jupiter

Filed under Jupiter, scale comparisons, Cassini, New Horizons, Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, amateur image processing

Go Back

A total of seven spacecraft have visited Jupiter to date, and six of them returned global images. (Because of the problem with its high-gain antenna, the Galileo orbiter returned no global views.) These six images show how Jupiter's atmospheric features are generally constant but can differ in detail with time. For example, the Great Red Spot, which has existed for at least three hundred years, has been steadily shrinking and becoming more round (less oval) with time. The Voyagers and Cassini found turbulent regions to the northeast of the Great Red Spot, while the area was clear to the Pioneers and New Horizons. The dark belts and bright zones shift slightly up and down and change in relative brightness over time.

Copyright holder: Björn Jónsson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about February 28, 2007