This is a collage of a series of photographs taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The picture shows Jupiter and the four Galilean satellites that orbit Jupiter. The positions of these satellites are in the correct order but are not made to scale. Io, the reddish moon, is closest to Jupiter. Europa is located near the center and Ganymede and Callisto are on the lower right corner.

This is a photo of Jupiter taken by Voyager 1 while 25 million miles (40 million km) away. Almost unnoticable is Jupiter’s satellite Ganymede located at the bottom left. Most prominent is the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Jupiter’s atmosphere is visible and a yellow cloud can be seen swirling around the the spot in a counterclockwise direction that has been measured to have a period of six earth days.

The spacecraft Voyager 2 took this picture of Jupiter from 24 million kilometers away. The details seen in this picture include the cloud patterns of Jupiter. Also very noticable is the shadow of Ganymede that is casted on Jupiter’s atmosphere on the left. Io, one of the four Jovian satellites, is shown on the right.

The image shows three specific storms on Jupiter that lie southwest (below and to the left) of Jupiter's Great Red Spot which all changed in appearance in 1995 when the picture was taken. Two of these storms were spotted in the 1930’s by ground based telescopes. This color picture is assembled from a series of images taken by theWide Field Planetary Camera 2, in planetary camera mode, when Jupiter was at a distance of 519 million miles (961 million kilometers) from Earth. These images are part of a set of data obtained by a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) team headed by Reta Beebe of New Mexico State University.

This is two views of Jupiter. The image at left was recorded by Dr. Richard J. Terrile on Jan. 10, 1979, with the 200 inch Hale telescope at Palomar Mountain, California, using an infrared detector. Photo at right was taken Jan. 10, 1979,by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratorymanages the Voyager project for the Office of Space Science.

This image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and it reveals Jupiter’s auroral emissions and small auroral spots. It is believed that these emissions are directly linked to Jupiter’s moon, Io. The top panel shows the effects of emissions from Io. The black-and-white image on the left shows that Io and Jupiter are interconnected by an invisible electrical current of charged particles. The images were taken by the telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 between May 1994 and September 1995.

This is an image of Jupiter also taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that shows the northern and southern auroras that were taken under ultraviolet light conditions by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS).

This is a view of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot taken by Voyager 1 while it was more than 5.7 million miles (9.2 kilometers) away. As shown, the wind patterns in the red spot is almost circular but the cloud pattarns are complex. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Voyager mission for NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications.

This is a false color image of the Great Red Spot. The colors are produced by computer enhancements so as to make the cloud patterns more visible.   JPL manages and controls the Voyager Project for NASA's Office of Space Science.

This is another enhanced color image of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter’s atmosphere. The estimated distance of this Red spot, from North to South (top to bottom) is over 24,000 km.

Several spacecraft have flown by Jupiter to closely examine it in more detail. The Pioneer 10 managed to send back 23 low-resolution images in December of 1972. Pioneer 11 also flew by Jupiter and sent back data on its atmospheric composition and information about Jupiter's moons. The Voyager missions also sent back data from Jupiter. The Galileo spacecraft reached Jupiter in December 1995 and managed to send back great amounts of data on Jupiter's atmosphere and was the first to orbit Jupiter. The Galileo also took pictures of the collision between Jupiter and the Shoemaker-Levy comet. Click here to download a great animation of the comet crashing into Jupiter (637K)

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The four largest moons are the called Galilean Satellites. They are the Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. Among them, Io is the most prominent because of its volcanic activity. The more 200 volcanoes on Io are still active today. There is also a thin atmosphere of sulfur dioxide on Io. Another satellite, Europa, is known for the existence of water on its surface. It is believed that an ice crust as thick as 47-62 miles (75-100km) lies on Europa. The ice periodically melts and floods the surface of Europa due to the heat of its interior. The satellite Ganymede also contains ice. Ganymede is larger than Mercury and there is evidence of great tectonic activity on Ganymede. Callisto is the most famous for its cratered surface. As a matter of fact, no other body in the solar system has been observed to have more craters than Callisto. The other smaller moons around Jupiter are only from 9 to 115 miles (15-185km) wide and are believed to be captured asteroids.