New images of Jupiter and its moons are in from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft -- the fastest spacecraft ever launched, traveling at 50,000 mph. On its way to Pluto, the spacecraft traveled about 1.4 million miles from the Jupiter on Feb 28.
The piano-sized robotic probe's seven cameras and sensors shot Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700 observations on its digital recorders and sending the information back to Earth.
New Horizon's has radioed about 70 percent of the expected 34 gigabits of data to NASA’s largest antennas over 600 million miles away, confirming that the craft's instruments and software work. Below are Jupiter's moons.
New Horizons reached Jupiter just 13 months after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida in January 2006. It should arrive in Pluto by 2015.
More fantastic images after the Jump!
Io is the most geologically active body in the solar system. The bright spots are glowing lava and gas.
New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), a telescopic camera, took the image on the left. The Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA), an infrared spectral imager, took the lower-right image. The Multiple Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), designed for the very faint solar illumination at Pluto, took the top-right image.
A sunlit umbrella-shaped dust plume rising 200 miles into space from the volcano Tvashtar in what NASA says is the best images ever of a giant eruption on Io.
Jupiter in all its gigantic glory.
The "little" red spot is as large as Earth.
