Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute
Caption: The Galilean satellite Io floats above the cloudtops of Jupiter in this image captured on the dawn of the new millennium, January 1, 2001 10:00 UTC (spacecraft time), two days after Cassini's closest approach. The image is deceiving: there are 350,000 kilometers -- roughly 2.5 Jupiters -- between Io and Jupiter's clouds. Io is the size of our Moon, and Jupiter is very big.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Usage Restrictions: Image is in the public domain. Appropriate credit is requested.