Rings of Jupiter Rings of Jupiter The planet Jupiter has a system of rings known as the rings of Jupiter or the Jovian ring system. It was the third ring system to be discovered in the Solar System, after those of Saturn and Uranus. It was first observed in 1979 by the "Voyager 1" space probe and thoroughly investigated in the 1990s by the "Galileo" orbiter. It has also been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope and from Earth for several years. Ground-based observations of the rings require the largest available telescopes. The Jovian ring system is faint and consists mainly of dust.
Distant minor planet AU. This threshold, which is just beyond the orbit of Jupiter (5.2 AU), ensures that the vast majority of "true asteroids" – such as the near-Earth, Mars-crosser, main-belt and Jupiter trojan populations – are excluded from the distant minor planets. Distant minor planet A distant minor planet, or "distant object", is any minor planet found beyond Jupiter in the outer Solar System that is not commonly thought of as an "asteroid". The umbrella term is used by IAU's Minor Planet Center (MPC), which is responsible for the identification, designation and orbit computation of these objects. , the MPC maintains 3497