[X] My Assistant

[Mark6]

Active Interplanetary Probes At Any Given Time.

This is a timeline of every space probe that ever made it out of Earth orbit and to another celestial body. Its purpose is to visualize, as you scroll up and down the page, how the flotilla of Earth's emissaries throughout the solar system has grown and shrunk with time - but mostly grown.

[elakdawalla]

I really recommend learning CSS -- it saves a TON of work. Like HTML, all you need is a super-basic introduction -- then you can start plagiarizing styles from sites you like. Here's a site that I found useful when I was figuring out CSS. http://www.w3schools.com/css/

By the way, those dates I gave you for the Voyagers are, if I remember correctly, just the first and last dates that images were taken; they may or may not precisely match what the mission regards as the "encounter period."

For Cassini, images are labeled with a "MISSION_PHASE_NAME" of "JUPITER_ENCOUNTER" from January 14, 2001 to March 12, 2001.

For New Horizons, the LORRI image database for the Jupiter encounter starts with images taken on January 8, 2007 and ends with images taken on June 11, 2007; but the last Jupiter system target was imaged on March 27 (the remaining images were targeted at Earth). However, I'm pretty sure they were taking magnetic field data for longer, as they were riding down the magnetotail. Science Magazine articles describe observations of the magnetotail out to past 2500 Rj, which they crossed on DOY 172 (whatever that is; it must be close to June 11 though, being a little less than halfway through the year). I don't know if they ended there, though.

I don't have such info for Ulysses, as it didn't have a camera, and cameraless spacecraft just aren't on my radar screen.

--Emily

[Mark6]

I don't have such info for Ulysses, as it didn't have a camera, and cameraless spacecraft just aren't on my radar screen.

--Emily

Well, I found it. Ulysses' effective time at Jupiter was less than a month.

[tedstryk]

Ulysses was inside the magnetosphere from February 2 to 14, 1992, and the official encounter dates were 1992-01-25
to 1992-02-17. Still, Ulysses studied things such as dust emissions from Io, extreme ultraviolet emissions from Jupiter and Io torus, and radio bursts for a long time before and after that. Formally speaking, the Jupiter Distant Encounter lasted from November 19, 2003 to April 1, 2004. The reason for the longer official period is that given the declining power supply, in order to collect data similar to the distant data collected before the 1992 encounter using all instruments, they had to shut off the tape recorder. This meant the need for 24/7 DSN coverage during the encounter period.

Here is an extreme ultraviolet map I reprocessed from data for January 11, 1992 showing Jupiter as well as the Milky Way and interstellar hydrogen on the "windward" side of the solar system (same side the Voyagers and Pioneer 11 are heading out). Note that the Jovian hydrogen cloud is larger than the actual disk of Jupiter. Ulysses produced many such maps, but the datasets from this date are some of the best and most complete.