On Feb. 28, New Horizons passed within 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) of Jupiter as part of a slingshot maneuver to give it a speed boost as it races toward its main target Pluto. During the move, the spacecraft snapped hundreds of images of the Jupiter system.

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Some of those images, unveiled today during a NASA news conference, reveal never-before-seen features of the planet and its moons. New Horizon's principal investigator, Alan Stern, said New Horizon's Jupiter flyby was "successful beyond our wildest dreams."

"This is the eighth mission to Jupiter, and it gives us a chance for the first time to take these modern instruments in close where Cassini couldn't go and with the bandwidth that Galileo couldn't deliver to really unveil new views of the system," Stern said.

A Jovian photo feast

Among the new images unveiled today is one showing Jupiter's high altitude clouds and a haze at the planet's south pole probably formed by charged particles transported there during one of the gas giant's auroras.

Another image provides the best picture yet of Jupiter's charcoal-black rings. "Most people didn't realize Jupiter had rings. When you say rings, most people think of Saturn," said New Horizons scientist Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center. "By incredible good luck, we happened to be at the right trajectory with the right instruments to study these."

There are images capturing several simultaneous volcanic eruptions on Jupiter's moon Io and one of a volcanic plume jettisoned up 200 miles above the moon's surface. Another picture shows in stunning detail Jupiter's Little Red Spot, a new storm system that is smaller than the planet's famous Great Red Spot.

"It's sort of reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Night painting," said Hal Weaver, a New Horizons project scientist at John Hopkins University. "But this is the real deal. It's not in somebody's imagination."

Stern's favorite image shows Jupiter's icy moon Europa rising above the Jupiter cloud tops. The shot is one of many the spacecraft was programmed to take for artistic, rather than scientific, purposes.

"I'd say if you haven't been to Jupiter yet, you have now, and New Horizon has taken you there," Stern said.

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