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 photographs of the moon’s northern latitudes. Planetary scientists have now reworked the pictures collected in the course of 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, essentially 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 affected 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 knowledge on a 200-km- (127-mile-) lengthy lava lake referred to as Loki Patera.”
“There’s wonderful element displaying these loopy islands embedded in the course of a doubtlessly magma lake rimmed with sizzling 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 knowledge 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 might be colder than center latitudes.
Throughout Juno’s prolonged mission, the spacecraft flies nearer to the north pole of Jupiter with every go.
This altering orientation permits the MWR instrument to enhance its decision of Jupiter’s northern polar cyclones.
The info permit multiwavelength comparisons of the poles, revealing that not all polar cyclones are created equal.
“Maybe most hanging instance of this disparity will 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 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 workforce continues to gather extra and higher microwave knowledge with each orbit, so we anticipate growing a extra detailed 3D map of those intriguing polar storms.”
