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PIA03451: Cassini's Farewell to Jupiter
On January 15, 2001, 17 days after it passed its closest approach to Jupiter, NASA's Cassini spacecraft looked back to see the giant planet as a thinning crescent.
 Target Name:  Jupiter
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens 
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  Imaging Science Subsystem 
 Product Size:  1349 x 1603 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  CICLOPS / University of Arizona 
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA03451.tif (1.024 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA03451.jpg (48.02 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

On January 15, 2001, 17 days after it passed its closest approach to Jupiter, NASA's Cassini spacecraft looked back to see the giant planet as a thinning crescent.

This image is a color mosaic from that day, shot from a distance of 18.3 million kilometers (11.4 million miles). The smallest visible features are roughly 110 kilometers (70 miles) across. The solar phase angle, the angle from the spacecraft to the planet to the Sun, is 120 degrees.

A crescent Io, innermost of Jupiter's four large moons, appears to the left of Jupiter.

Cassini collected its last Jupiter images on March 22, 2001, as the spacecraft continued the final leg of its journey to a July 1, 2004, appointment with Saturn.

Cassini 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, Calif., manages Cassini for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Image Addition Date:
2001-05-31