Friday, September 11, 2009

Global views of Jupiter from Galileo's ninth orbit

Despite its antenna problems, Galileo accomplished some remarkable science.  However, a major loss was the lack of global views during the orbital mission.  Ignoring the resurrected OPNAV image I posted recently, this is largely true. However, in between Galileo's 9th and 10th orbit, it obtained some highly compressed, high phase global imagery.   The images are reduced to 75% of the original resolution because of the damage from  interlacing and compression.

This image, obtained September 3, 1997, shows an extremely thin crescent.  Some band structure can be seen, but not much else.


The next mosaic, obtained on September 10, 1997, is taken from a slightly lower phase angle, and shows a lot of atmospheric features.  I am really surprised this image was not processed for a press release or at least the Galileo website.



The final image, a crop of the image above, has been put through a high pass filter to show some of the "spots," storms in the Jovian atmosphere, that are visible in this dataset.

 
Processed images Copyright Ted Stryk, Raw Data Courtesy NASA/JPL

No comments: