The Cassini space probe made its closest pass to the Planet Jupiter over the Christmas holiday season of 2,000. The probe, which came within 6 million miles of the gas giant, will use Jupiters gravitational pull to give it a boost to its next destination, the planet Saturn. On the way by, Cassini sent back some spectacular pictures of Jupiters enormous thunderstorms. Unlike storms on earth, which can pass in a day, a violent storm on Jupiter, such as the enormous thunderstorm known as the Great Red Spot, can rage for centuries. The Spot was first seen almost three hundred years ago, and the storm is still raging on Jupiters surface to this very day. Cassini has also had strange encounters with Jupiter's unpredictable magnetic field. The probe encountered the field weeks previous to its close encounter with the planet, and the field then collapsed, leaving the probe to have another encounter with the field much closer to the planet days before Christmas 2000. Cassini's fly by of Jupiter will last until this spring, and it is also scheduled to drop a probe onto Titan, a moon of Jupiter.
Cassini approaches Jupiter, October 2000. JPL - NASA
Both the Cassini and Galileo space craft are currently in orbit around Jupiter, making this the first time that two such probes have ever been studying a planet in our solar system simultaneously. This would appear to be a coincidence and not something that had been planned for when launching both the craft, as the Galileo probe is already functioned more than twice as long as it was expected to perform, and absorbed three times as much radiation as it was supposed to be able tolerate since it went into orbit around Jupiter in 1995.
Cassini makes its closest pass to Jupiter December 30, 2000. JPL- NASA
One of the tasks of the Cassini probe is to study Jupiters weather. Scientists are interested in finding out why weather patterns on Jupiter are so persistent, while weather on earth is so transient and unstable. The Cassini probe is already returning images of Jupiters turbulent weather which have been made into movies, which are available at the Nasa site (low resolution around 300k, high resolution a couple of megabytes).
