Artist's conception of how rings may be produced by debris from collisions
with small satellites. The satellite, shown at the right side, moves
about Jupiter on a circular equatorial orbit, viewed here from an oblique
angle. The satellite is continually bombarded by high speed interplanetary
meteoroids. Most of the debris from these collisions escapes the satellite
totally and moves along its own orbit about Jupiter. At first,
because the escape speeds are very much less than orbital speeds,
these particles move along paths almost identical to that of the source
satellite. Over time as they absorb sunlight, the orbits
of the small particles spiral inward. An equatorial planetary ring,
shown shaded, develops; the ring's radial extent depends on how long
the particles survive in Jupiter's fierce surroundings.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the Galileo 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://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/.
Background information and educational context for the images can be found at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sepo.
