Planets and Moons  ID: 3610

Jupiter Cloud Sequence from Cassini

When the Cassini mission flew by the planet Jupiter in late 2000, a sequence of full disk images were taken of the planet. Assembled with proper spatial and temporal registration, the sequence could produce fourteen distinct images suitable for wrapping around a sphere.

But the time steps between images were large and exhibited significant jumping. The solution was to create additional images between the existing set by interpolation. But simple interpolation would not work due to significant changes between the images.

To solve this, we interpolated between the images using the velocity vector field of the cloud images. The velocity vector field was computed by performing a 2-dimensional cross-correlation (Wikipedia: Cross-correlation) between the images. This velocity field was checked against Jupiter velocity profiles from the scientific literature and agreement was excellent. With the addition of a simple vortex flow at the location of the Great Red Spot, the interpolation process was used to generate intermediate images, increasing the total number of images from 14 to 220 and resulting in a smoother animation. The elapsed time between each interpolated frame corresponds to about 1 hour. More info on the image sequence is available at Jupiter Mosaics and Movies - Rings, Satellites, Atmosphere

IMPORTANT NOTE: These images are for visualization purposes only. They are not suitable for scientific analysis.


Visualization Credits

Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.): Lead Animator
Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC): Animator
Victoria Weeks (HTSI): Video Editor
Michael Starobin (HTSI): Producer
Amy A. Simon (NASA/GSFC): Scientist
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, the Cassini Imaging Team, CICLOPS, and Cosmos Studios. Special thanks to Andrew Ingersoll (CalTech) for technical assistance.

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3610

Data Used:
Cassini/Imaging Science Subsystem also referred to as: Cassini/Jupiter imagery
Mosaic - Cassini Imagery/Central Laboratory for OPerations - October 31, 2000-November 9, 2000
Cassini/Jupiter imagery
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This item is part of these series:
Science On a Sphere
SOS Production - LARGEST

Keywords:
SVS >> Jupiter
SVS >> Science On a Sphere
SVS >> Jupiter >> Great Red Spot
NASA Science >> Planets and Moons