Hello Again, Jupiter!

The brick red, white and brown cloud bands of Jupiter are seen here from Saturn orbit. The Cassini spacecraft's powerful imaging cameras were specially designed to photograph nearby bodies (cosmically speaking) in the Saturn system, but as this image demonstrates, the cameras are actually telescopes.

Jupiter is imaged here from more than 11 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, or slightly farther than the average Earth-Saturn distance. As demonstrated by Pale Blue Orb, Earth is only about a pixel across when viewed from Saturn by Cassini.

Cassini's parting glance at Jupiter, following the spacecraft's 2000 flyby and gravity assist, is Cassini's Farewell to Jupiter.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 8, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.8 billion kilometers (1.1 billion miles) from Jupiter and at a Sun-Jupiter-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Scale in the original image was about 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) per pixel. The image was contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of two and a half to enhance the visibility of cloud features on the planet.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute