NASA’s Juno spacecraft has captured views of Jupiter’s moon Io – essentially the most volcanic physique within the Photo voltaic System – displaying a mountain and a {smooth} lake of cooling lava.
The views have been produced by members of the Juno group, who created animations utilizing information collected by Juno’s flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024.
In the course of the flybys, Juno flew inside about 930 miles (1,500 kilometres) of Io’s floor and captured the primary ever close-up photographs of the Jovian moon’s northern latitudes.
“Io is solely affected by volcanoes, and we caught just a few of them in motion,” says Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton.
“We additionally acquired some nice close-ups and different information on a 200-kilometre-long (127-mile-long) lava lake known as Loki Patera.”
“There’s wonderful element displaying these loopy islands embedded in the course of a probably magma lake rimmed with scorching lava.
“The specular reflection our devices recorded of the lake suggests components of Io’s floor are as {smooth} as glass, harking back to volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”
Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) additionally revealed that Io has a floor comparatively {smooth} in comparison with the remainder of Jupiter’s Galilean moons and has poles which are colder than its center latitudes.
Throughout Juno’s most up-to-date flyby of Io, on 9 April, it got here inside about 10,250 miles (16,500 kilometres) of the floor. It is going to start its 61st flyby of Jupiter on 12 Could 2024.
Jupiter’s cyclone storms
Different latest information collected by the Juno spacecraft pertains to Jupiter’s northern polar cyclones.
These swirling storms are studied in larger element by Juno because it flies nearer to the north pole of Jupiter throughout every polar orbit.
Information reveals that the polar cyclones are a spread of sizes and buildings.
“Maybe most placing instance of this disparity will be discovered with the central cyclone at Jupiter’s north pole,” says Steve Levin, Juno’s challenge scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
“It’s clearly seen in each infrared and visual gentle photographs, however its microwave signature is nowhere close to as robust as different close by storms.
“This tells us that its subsurface construction should be very completely different from these different cyclones.
“The MWR group continues to gather extra and higher microwave information with each orbit, so we anticipate creating a extra detailed 3D map of those intriguing polar storms.”
