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The Jupiter Gallery

Like learning about the planets? Take a look at our Saturn Gallery and JumpStart Science on Gas Giants.

All images & text coutesy NSSDC

<< 5/12 < > This is a Hubble Space Telescope 'family portrait' of the four largest moons of Jupiter, first observed by the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei nearly four centuries ago. Located approximately one-half billion miles away, the moons are so small that, in visible light, they appear as fuzzy disks in the largest ground-based telescopes. Hubble can resolve surface details seen previously only by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. While the Voyagers provided close-up snapshots of the satellites, Hubble can now follow changes on the moons and reveal other characteristics at ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths.

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