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Posted by baalke on March 9, 2007, 4:41 pm
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http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/030907.html
New Horizons
Jupiter's Rings
March 9, 2007
The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped this
photo of Jupiter's ring system on February 24, 2007, from a distance
of
7.1 million kilometers (4.4 million miles).
This processed image shows a narrow ring, about 1,000 kilometers (600
miles) wide, with a fainter sheet of material inside it. "This is one
of
the clearest pictures ever taken of Jupiter's faint ring system," says
Dr. Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer from the SETI Institute in
Mountain View, Calif., who planned many of the ring images. "The ring
looks different from what we expected - it has usually appeared much
wider."
Showalter suggests that the ring's largest boulders are corralled into
a
narrow belt by the influence of Jupiter's two innermost moons,
Adrastea
and Metis. The ring also appears to darken in the middle, a possible
hint that a smaller, undiscovered moon is clearing out a gap. "If
there
is a smaller moon within those rings, we hope to see it in some of the
hundreds of additional images that New Horizons will transmit back to
Earth over the next several weeks," says Dr. Andy Cheng, LORRI
principal
investigator from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
Showalter adds that the faint glow extending in from the ring is
likely
caused by fine dust that diffuses in toward Jupiter. This is the outer
tip of the "halo," a cloud of dust that extends down to Jupiter's
cloud
tops. The dust will glow much brighter in pictures taken after New
Horizons passes to the far side of Jupiter and looks back at the
rings,
which will then be sunlit from behind.
Jupiter's ring system was discovered in 1979, when astronomers spied
it
in a single image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Months later,
Voyager 2 carried out more extensive imaging of the system. It has
since
been examined by NASA's Galileo and Cassini spacecraft, as well as by
the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based observatories.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
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