When the Cassini spacecraft finally gets to Saturn next year, it will have some big shoes to fill -- its own. The robotic probe has snapped what's being billed as the best picture ever of Jupiter.While astronomers eagerly await Cassini's encore, expected to involve the most detailed exploration ever made of Saturn, mission managers are reveling in the new Jupiter photo, taken Dec. 29, 2000 and released today. "The imaging team wanted very much to take the ultimate picture of Jupiter," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "The one that would show Jupiter in all its intricate and glorious complexity, the one that would knock your socks off." The mosaic photograph, involving of 27 snapshots made with Cassini's narrow-angle camera, was taken about a day before the craft's closest approach to Jupiter. At the time, the NASA probe busy collecting other data, and scientists back home were busy analyzing it all."We managed to wedge this series of images in among all the pressing scientific observations going on near Cassini’s closest approach to Jupiter and we’re very glad now that we did," Porco said. Porco and her colleagues said it is the most detailed global color view of Jupiter ever seen. It was taken from about 6.2 million miles (10 million kilometers) away.
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