Bruce Murray Space Image Library

Five Jovian days: The Voyager 2 Jupiter rotation movie

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Between 20:34 hours (UTC) on May 27 and 22:34 hours (UTC) on May 29, Voyager 2 took 1,251 NAC frames, shuttered through a repeating sequence of orange, green, and violet filters. Only three didn't make it to Earth, but about 40 suffered significant data loss. This sequence covered five Jovian days. Unlike its sister craft, Voyager 2’s inbound trajectory was noticeably inclined to the Jovian equator; indeed, the sub-spacecraft latitude was approximately 8 degrees north. The phase angle, at nearly 38 degrees, is higher than Voyager 1’s perspective, so Jupiter appears in a gibbous phase. The movement of Jupiter in this video is a smoothed and averaged-out representation of the attitude of Voyager's scan platform as it took this sequence.

Learn  more about this video in Ian Regan's blog entry.

Further details:

Start: May 27, 1979

Distance to Jupiter at start: 33.2 million km

End: May 29, 1979

Distance to Jupiter at end: 31.8 million km

Frames returned to Earth: 1,248 (out of 1,251 commanded)

Time interval between frames: 2 minutes, 24 seconds

Moon phenomena: Io (transit & occultation), Europa (occultation), Ganymede (near occultation).

Phase Angle: 37.7 deg