Collision
42. Jupiter
bruises
This is the first full-disc, natural-colour image
of Jupiter made with Hubble’s Wide Field
Camera 3 (WFC3). It is the sharpest visiblelight picture of Jupiter since the New Horizons
spacecraft flew by in 2007. Each pixel in
this high-resolution image spans about 119
kilometres in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter
was more than 600 million kilometres from
Earth when the images were taken.
The dark smudge at bottom right is debris
from a comet or asteroid that plunged into
Jupiter’s atmosphere and disintegrated.
In addition to the fresh impact, the image
reveals a spectacular variety of shapes in
the swirling atmosphere of Jupiter. The planet
is wrapped in bands of yellow, brown and
white clouds. These bands are produced by
the atmosphere flowing in different directions
at various places. When these opposing flows
interact, turbulence appears.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Michael Wong (Space
Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore,
MD), H. B. Hammel (Space Science
Institute, Boulder, CO) and the Jupiter
Impact Team
43.
Quadruple
moon transit
This close-up view of Saturn’s disc
captures the transit of several moons
across the face of the gas giant planet.
The giant orange moon Titan — larger
than the planet Mercury — can be seen
at upper right. The white icy moons that
are much closer to Saturn, hence much
closer to the ring plane in this view, are,
from left to right: Enceladus, Dione, and
Mimas. The dark band running across
the face of the planet slightly above
the rings is the shadow of the rings cast
on the planet. This picture was taken on
24 February 2009, when Saturn was at a
distance of roughly 1.25 billion kilometres
from Earth. Hubble can see details as
small as 300 kilometres across on Saturn.
Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble
Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)