Two latest flybys of Jupiter’s moon Io by NASA’s Juno spacecraft revealed a few gorgeous surprises: a remarkably steep mountain and islands in the midst of a burbling lava lake. The brand new findings had been introduced yesterday by Scott Bolton, the principal investigator of the Juno mission, on the European Geophysical Union’s Common Meeting.
“Io is solely plagued by volcanoes, and we caught a couple of of them in motion,” Bolton mentioned in a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory launch. “There may be superb element exhibiting 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 Io flybys passed off in December 2023 and February 2024; Juno got here inside 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the moon’s floor. It imaged Io’s northern latitudes, and a few of these close-up photographs had been printed earlier this yr. The spacecraft has additionally imaged Jupiter’s moon Europa, whose icy floor stands in stark dichotomy to Io’s hellish surroundings. However that imagery pales compared to the visualizations constructed with new Juno information, collected by the spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) and its JunoCam imager.
The Juno workforce nicknamed the lately visualized mountain “Steeple Mountain.” Although NASA paperwork didn’t state the peak of the construction, Io’s Boosaule Montes is one in every of its most towering buildings, clocking in at about 10 miles (16 kilometers) tall.
As famous on NASA’s web site, Io’s “fixed volcanism and intense radiation make Io an unlikely vacation spot for all times.” Nonetheless, it’s nonetheless a incredible laboratory for researchers making an attempt to know photo voltaic system evolution. Io’s floor is at all times being renewed, as plains of lava coat the prevailing rock and funky into new layers.
Future information from the Juno mission may assist reveal the abundance of water on Jupiter and the character of the planet’s core. However there’s loads worthwhile to check on Io, which Juno has been orbiting for almost eight years. Juno made its most up-to-date flyby of Io this month, coming inside 10,250 miles (16,500 km) of the moon. Its subsequent flyby is scheduled for Could 12.
A model of this text initially appeared on Gizmodo.
