Jupiter: Main Ring and Halo PIA01622
The top and bottom panels show a mosaic of images of Jupiter's rings taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Jupiter is to the right of this mosaic, and different brightness scales accent different parts of the ring system. Jupiter's ring system has three parts -- a flat main ring; a halo inside the main ring shaped like a double-convex lens; and the gossamer ring outside the main ring.
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Image Credit: NASA/Cornell University  

The top and bottom panels show a mosaic of images of Jupiter's rings taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Jupiter is to the right of this mosaic, and different brightness scales accent different parts of the ring system. Jupiter's ring system has three parts -- a flat main ring; a halo inside the main ring shaped like a double-convex lens; and the gossamer ring outside the main ring. In the top view, a faint mist of particles is seen above and below the main ring. This vertically extended "halo" is unusual in planetary rings, and is caused by electromagnetic forces pushing the smallest grains, which carry electric charges, out of the ring plane. These images were taken through the clear filter of Galileo's onboard solid state imaging camera system on November 9, 1996. The resolution is approximately 24 kilometers per picture element along Jupiter's rings. Because the spacecraft was only about 0.5 degrees above the ring plane, the image is highly foreshortened vertically. The images were obtained when Galileo was in Jupiter's shadow, peering back toward the Sun, when the ring was approximately 2.3 million kilometers away.  
The view of Earth's moon in the explanatory graphics was created from images returned by the Clementine lunar orbiter, launched in 1994 by NASA and the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
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