A brand new animation reveals an unlimited lava lake on the floor of Jupiter’s moon Io.
The close-up view comes from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which swept inside 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the volcanic floor of Io in December 2023 and January 2024. These flybys offered the closest look ever at Jupiter’s innermost massive moon. Io hosts a whole lot of lively volcanoes. In response to NASA, their eruptions are typically so highly effective that they are often seen with telescopes on Earth.
The brand new photographs present Loki Patera, a 127-mile-long (200 km) lava lake on Io’s floor. Scientists have been observing this lava lake for many years. It sits over the magma reservoirs below Io’s floor. The cooling lava on the heart of the lake is ringed by presumably molten magma across the edges, Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the Juno mission, mentioned throughout a information convention Wednesday (April 16) on the European Geophysical Union Normal Meeting in Vienna.
“The specular reflection our devices recorded of the lake suggests elements of Io’s floor are as {smooth} as glass, harking back to volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth,” Bolton mentioned.
Rugged islands of rock crowd the lava lake’s inside. “There’s wonderful element exhibiting these loopy islands embedded in the course of a doubtlessly magma lake rimmed with scorching lava,” Bolton mentioned.
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Juno’s devices have decided that Io’s floor is smoother than the surfaces of Jupiter’s three different Galilean moons (Europa, Ganymede and Callisto). Io is barely bigger than Earth’s moon, and the surfaces that are not molten are largely coated with yellow sulfur and sulfur dioxide.
Juno continues to fly over Jupiter, amassing knowledge about its dramatic polar cyclones, every of which is the width of the continental U.S. The mission can also be measuring ranges of oxygen and hydrogen in Jupiter’s environment. The spacecraft will full its 61st flyby of Jupiter on Might 12.
