MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109.  TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

IMAGE CAPTION                    PIA-02823
                                 Oval Storms Merging on Jupiter
                                 October 23, 2000

These four images of clouds in a portion of Jupiter's southern 
hemisphere show steps in the consolidation of three "white oval" 
storms into one over a three-year span of time. They were 
obtained on four dates, from Sept. 18, 1997, to Sept. 2, 2000, by 
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.  The widths of the white ovals 
range from about 8,000 kilometers to 12,000 kilometers (about 
5,000 miles to 7,500 miles). North is up and east is to the 
right.

The top image shows three white oval storms, which had coexisted 
for about 60 years. They were nicknamed FA, DE and BC, in order 
from west to east. By mid-1998, as shown in the second image, the 
two easternmost storms had merged into one, called BE. By October 
1999, as shown in the third image, the merged oval and the last 
of the original three were approaching each other, but they were 
separated by a dark storm, called o1, between them. The two white 
oval storms later merged into a single storm, as shown in the 
final image from September 2000.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a facility of NASA and the European 
Space Agency. It is operated by the Space Telescope Science 
Institute, Baltimore, Md., which is managed for NASA by the 
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in 
Honolulu.

                            #####