The telescopic camera snapped the images during a 3-minute, 35-second span on February 10, when the spacecraft was 29 million kilometres from Jupiter. At this distance, Jupiter's diameter was 1,015 LORRI pixels - nearly filling the imager's entire (1,024-by-1,024 pixel) field of view. Features as small as 290 kilometers are visible.


 
This image of a plume erupting from Tvashtar, a volcano on Io was taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons at 11:04 Universal Time on February 28, 2007. Five hours after the spacecraft's closest approach to Jupiter, the picture was taken from a distance of 2.5 million kilometres.

The image was centred at 85 degrees west longitude, in the 11 o'clock direction near Io's north pole. The plume depicted is about 290 kilometres high. Seen at first by the Hubble Space Telescope, and then two weeks later on February 26 2007 by New Horizons itself, this image is much clearer. This is due to longer exposure; there is an excellent view of the night-side illuminated by Jupiter.

The filamentary structure seen in the plume is similar to that seen in the 1979 Voyager images of the plume produced by Io’s volcano Pele. This is the first time that these mysterious structures have been seen so clearly.


 
A drawing of space near Jupiter, showing a portion of the radiation belts (in red), the Io torus (green) and the Europa torus (blue). The blue and green belts come from the atmospheres of the moons Europa and Io.

In a coordinated observation campaign started at the end of February 2007, ESA's Rosetta and NASA's New Horizon spacecraft are studying Jupiter's space environment, while travelling on their way to their respective destinations - comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and the Pluto system.

The picture comes from measurements taken by the Cassini spacecraft.


 
This ultraviolet image of Jupiter was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on 26 November 1998. The bright emissions above the dark blue background are auroral lights, similar to those seen above the Earth's polar regions. The aurorae are curtains of light resulting from high energy electrons following the planet's magnetic field into the upper atmosphere, where collisions with atmospheric atoms and molecules produce the observed light.



Release date: 19 October 2007