In December 2023 and February 2024, NASA’s Juno spacecraft made extraordinarily shut flybys of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, getting inside about 1,500 km (930 miles) of the floor and acquiring the primary close-up pictures of the moon’s northern latitudes. Planetary scientists have now remodeled the pictures collected throughout the flybys into animations that spotlight two of Io’s most dramatic options: a mountain and an virtually glass-smooth lake of cooling lava referred to as Loki Patera.
The JunoCam instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft imaged Io, probably the most geologically energetic physique in our Photo voltaic System, on February 3, 2024, from a distance of about 7,904 km (4,911 miles). Picture credit score: NASA / SwRI / MSSS.
“Io is solely plagued by volcanoes, and we caught a couple of of them in motion,” mentioned Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton, director of the Area Science and Engineering Division on the Southwest Analysis Institute.
“We additionally acquired some nice close-ups and different information on a 200-km- (127-mile-) lengthy lava lake referred to as Loki Patera.”
“There’s wonderful element exhibiting these loopy islands embedded in the midst 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, paying homage to volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”
Maps generated with information collected by Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument reveal Io not solely has a floor that’s comparatively {smooth} in comparison with Jupiter’s different Galilean moons, but in addition has poles which can be colder than center latitudes.
Throughout Juno’s prolonged mission, the spacecraft flies nearer to the north pole of Jupiter with every cross.
This altering orientation permits the MWR instrument to enhance its decision of Jupiter’s northern polar cyclones.
The info enable multiwavelength comparisons of the poles, revealing that not all polar cyclones are created equal.
“Maybe most placing instance of this disparity may be discovered with the central cyclone at Jupiter’s north pole,” mentioned Juno’s mission scientist Dr. Steve Levin, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“It’s clearly seen in each infrared and visual gentle pictures, 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 totally 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.”
