NASA’s Juno mission is greatest identified for the beautiful photographs of Jupiter that it has taken since its launch in 2011 and arrival at Jupiter in 2016. However the spacecraft hasn’t solely investigated the planet — it has additionally studied Jupiter’s many moons, like the big Ganymede and the icy Europa. Lately, the spacecraft has been making shut flybys of the Jovian moon Io, which is probably the most volcanically lively physique within the photo voltaic system. And it has noticed some dramatic options there, like a lake of lava and a big mountain.
Though Jupiter (and Io) are each removed from the solar, and due to this fact obtain little warmth from daylight, Io nonetheless has excessive inside temperatures. That’s as a result of Jupiter is so giant that its gravitational pull acts on Io and creates friction, heating it up in a course of referred to as tidal heating. Although the floor of the moon is chilly, at beneath minus 200 levels Fahrenheit (minus 130 levels Celsius), the volcanoes spewing out materials from the planet’s scorching inside can attain temperatures of hundreds of levels Fahrenheit.
The JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of Jupiter’s moon Io throughout the spacecraft’s sixtieth flyby of Jupiter on April 9. Picture credit score: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS. Picture processing: Gerald Eichstädt/Thomas Thomopoulos (CC BY)
The results of that heating had been seen in motion by Juno when it made its current shut passes of Io. “Io is just suffering from volcanoes, and we caught a number of of them in motion,” mentioned Juno’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton, at a information convention.
“We additionally obtained some nice close-ups and different knowledge on a 200-kilometer-long (127-mile-long) lava lake referred to as Loki Patera. There’s wonderful element displaying these loopy islands embedded in the midst of a doubtlessly magma lake rimmed with scorching lava. The specular reflection our devices recorded of the lake suggests components of Io’s floor are as clean as glass, paying homage to volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”
The unimaginable observations have been used to create this artist’s idea video (beneath) displaying what it will seem like to fly over this lava lake.
Wanting Into Io’s Loki Patera (Artist’s Idea)
One other hanging idea video (beneath) exhibits a construction referred to as Steeple Mountain, which spikes dramatically from the floor and is between 3 and 4.3 miles (5 and seven kilometers) excessive. The animation exhibits one facet of the mountain intimately whereas the opposite facet stays in shadow, as Juno solely noticed one facet of the mountain illuminated throughout its flybys.
A lot of this knowledge was collected throughout Juno’s most up-to-date flyby of Io on April 9, when it got here inside 3 and 4.3 miles (5 and seven kilometers). Its trajectory will proceed to take it on flybys of Jupiter as properly, so researchers hope to be taught extra about Jupiter, equivalent to particulars about how the planet shaped.
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