Animation of Southern Aurora UVS Observation
Look here for information on how to setup your browser to run animations.
NOTE: This animation is made available in order to share with the public the excitement of new discoveries being made via the NASA/JPL Galileo spacecraft. Galileo scientists are in the process of calibrating and validating this data. The full digital image necessary for scientific analysis will be released within one year of receipt of this orbit's last data.
This image is available only on the WWW; it is not available in hardcopy or other forms.
This movie is made from 30 minutes of data taken by Galileo's Ultraviolet Spectrometer (UVS) instrument. It observed Jupiter's south polar region on June 24, 1996 looking for aurora from 3,200,000 kilometers (2 million miles) away. The view seen by UVS is represented by a slit, which looks at a large portion of Jupiter since it is far away. In this movie, the slit moves from dark space, across the darkside of Jupiter, onto the sunlit brightside, and ends off the planet back on dark space. Each frame in the movie is about 1 minute of observing time. A black slit shows very little ultraviolet emission, blue shows moderate amounts, and white shows strong emission which comes mainly from the aurora and from the daylit side of Jupiter. The aurora emits light at a frequency outside of what our eye can normally see. However, the ultraviolet "Lyman-alpha" emission is detectable by a spectrometer and this light is measured by the UVS.
Credits: This observation was performed by the Galileo Ultraviolet Spectrometer
(UVS) Team.
Principal Investigator: Charles Hord, LASP
Co-Investigator's:
Wayne Pryor, LASP
W. Kent Tobiska, NYMA/JPL
Joe Ajello, JPL
Don Shemansky, USC
Karen Simmons, LASP
Jeremy Gebben, LASP
Deborah Miller, LASP
Greg Ruiz, LASP
Stuart Stephens, NYMA/JPL
Animation graphics were produced with the Geometry and Graphics Software (GGS) visualizaton program at LASP/Colorado. Quicktime implementation by Laura Barnard at JPL.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC.
This image and other images and data received from Galileo are posted on the World Wide Web, on the Galileo mission home page at URL http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo. Background information and educational context for the images can be found at URL http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sepo.
Return to Galileo Ganymede 1 Images
Return to Countdown to Ganymede Home Page
Return to Project Galileo Homepage
244K