Cassini Images of Jupiter Studied

En route to Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft, a joint mission of NASA, the European Space Agencyand the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, took advantage of its Jupiter flyby to test its two-camera Imaging Science Subsystem, collecting approximately 26,000 images from October 2000 to March 2001. In the March 7 issue of Science, an international team of researchers working on the project released its analysis of the images of the planet's atmosphere, auroras, moons and rings.

The instrument features a wide-angle camera with an angular resolution of 60 µrad per pixel and a narrow-angle camera with an angular resolution of 6 µrad per pixel. The former employs a set of 18 filters to image at wavelengths between 380 and 1100 nm, and the latter uses 24 filters and images at between 200 and 1100 nm. Both incorporate 1024 x 1024-pixel CCD sensors.