NASA’s Juno mission scientists have used advanced information collected throughout two flybys of Jupiter’s third largest moon Io to create animations that spotlight this moon’s most dramatic options. Io is a bit bit bigger than the planet Earth and can also be dwelling to a mountain with a clean lake of lava. Lava lakes like Io’s Loki Patera have a cooling floor crust that slowly thickens till it turns into denser than the underlying magma. It then sinks and pulls within the close by crust.
First launched in 2011, Juno arrived at our photo voltaic system’s largest planet in 2016 with a mission to discover the Jovian system. It has 95 recognized moons and its 4 largest–Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto–are known as the Galilean moons. Io is most volcanically energetic.
This animation is an artist’s idea of Loki Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io, made utilizing information from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. With a number of islands in its inside, Loki is a melancholy crammed with magma and rimmed with molten lava. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.
“Io is solely plagued by volcanoes, and we caught a couple of of them in motion,” Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton mentioned in a press release. “We additionally bought some nice close-ups and different information on a 200-kilometer-long [127-mile-long] lava lake known as Loki Patera. There’s superb element displaying these loopy islands embedded in the midst of a probably magma lake rimmed with sizzling lava. The specular reflection our devices recorded of the lake suggests components of Io’s floor are as clean as glass, harking back to volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”
The observations had been introduced April 16 through the European Geophysical Union Normal Meeting in Vienna, Austria.
[Related: See the most volcanic world in our solar system in new NASA images.]
Juno carried out very shut flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, getting inside 930 miles of the floor. The spacecraft obtained first close-up photographs of Io’s northern latitudes. Maps created with information collected by Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument present that Io has a floor that’s extra clean in comparison with Jupiter’s different Galilean moons, but additionally has poles which might be colder than their center latitudes.
Created utilizing information collected by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno throughout flybys in December 2023 and February 2024, this animation is an artist’s idea of a function on the Jovian moon Io that the mission science crew nicknamed “Steeple Mountain.” CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Mountains and polar cyclones
With each go, Juno flies nearer to the north pole of Jupiter. Altering the spacecraft’s orientation permits the MWR instrument to enhance its decision of Jupiter’s northern polar cyclones. These storms on the high of the gasoline big can attain wind speeds of 220 miles per hour and the information collected by Juno reveals that not all polar cyclones are created equal.
“Maybe [the] most placing instance of this disparity will be discovered with the central cyclone at Jupiter’s north pole,” Steve Levin, Juno’s mission scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mentioned in a press release. “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 have to be very totally different from these different cyclones. The MWR crew continues to gather extra and higher microwave information with each orbit, so we anticipate growing a extra detailed 3D map of those intriguing polar storms.”
Simply how a lot water is on Jupiter? An everlasting thriller
One in every of Juno’s major science objectives is to gather information that can assist astronomers higher perceive Jupiter’s water abundance. Nevertheless, the crew isn’t searching for liquid water. As a substitute, they’re finding out Jupiterl’s environment to quantify the presence of the molecules that make up water–oxygen and hydrogen. In accordance with NASA, an correct estimate of oxygen and hydrogen molecules current in Jupiter’s environment is essential to unlocking a number of the underlying mysteries of how our photo voltaic system fashioned.
Jupiter was seemingly the primary planet to type roughly 4.5 billion years in the past. It additionally accommodates many of the gasoline and dirt that wasn’t integrated into the solar when the photo voltaic system fashioned. Water abundance additionally has vital implications for Jupiter’s meteorology and inside construction.
[Related: Juno finally got close enough to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot to measure its depth.]
In 1995, NASA’s Galileo probe supplied early information on the quantity of water on Jupiter, however the information created extra questions than solutions. It confirmed that the gasoline big’s environment was unexpectedly sizzling and truly disadvantaged of water—opposite to what laptop fashions had initially indicated.
“The probe did superb science, however its information was thus far afield from our fashions of Jupiter’s water abundance that we thought-about whether or not the placement it sampled may very well be an outlier. However earlier than Juno, we couldn’t verify,” mentioned Bolton. “Now, with latest outcomes made with MWR information, we have now nailed down that the water abundance close to Jupiter’s equator is roughly three to 4 occasions the photo voltaic abundance when in comparison with hydrogen. This definitively demonstrates that the Galileo probe’s entry web site was an anomalously dry, desert-like area.”
[Related: Jupiter’s icy ocean worlds could be cool travel destinations in the future.]
The brand new outcomes help the concept someday through the formation of our solar-system, water-ice materials could have been the supply of heavy ingredient enrichment. These are chemical parts which might be heavier than hydrogen and helium that Jupiter accrued. The planet’s formation stays puzzling, as a result of Juno’s outcomes on the core of the gasoline big counsel that there’s very low water abundance. How considerable H20 is on the gasoline big stays a thriller that the Juno mission might probably resolve.
What’s subsequent for Juno
Information through the reminder of Juno’s mission might assist decide how a lot water is on Jupiter in two methods. It might allow scientists to check Jupiter’s water abundance close to the polar areas to the equatorial area. It additionally could shed extra gentle on the construction of the planet’s dilute liquid core.
Juno’s most up-to-date flyby of Io was on April 9 and the spacecraft got here inside about 10,250 miles of the moon’s floor. Its 61st flyby of Jupiter is scheduled for Might 12 and it’ll proceed to discover the planet and its moons by means of September 2025.
