Over the vacation weekend, NASA launched new images of Jupiter’s icy, volcanic moon Io. The Juno spacecraft flew inside roughly 930 miles of the celestial physique’s floor on December 30, 2023, capturing images that showcase a unstable and pockmarked moon.
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The JunoCam imager captured the new images. They depict a crimson sphere dotted with big grey volcanoes. Io is taken into account essentially the most volcanic world in our photo voltaic system. By comparability, Earth sees roughly 50 eruptions annually and Io might have volcanic exercise that’s 100 instances better. Jupiter’s gravitational pull is essentially liable for Io’s volcanism. A tug-of-war between the big planet and the extra gravitational results of Jupiter’s different big moons–Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto–intensifies frictional tidal heating on Io. It takes this moon about 42 hours to orbit Jupiter, and the immense warmth produced throughout orbit seemingly creates an ocean of magma beneath Io’s floor, fueling eruptions.
According to NASA, this was the closest flyby of Io since the same flight made by the Galileo spacecraft in October 2001. Launched in 2011, the Juno spacecraft first entered Jupiter’s orbit in 2016. It is the primary explorer to look beneath the fuel big’s dense clouds, with a mission to check our photo voltaic system’s largest planet and the origins of the photo voltaic system as an entire. The Juno mission has been monitoring the moon’s volcanic exercise from distances starting from about 6,830 miles to greater than 62,100 miles. The staff hopes that data collected within the December flyby and former observations from the mission assist them be taught extra about these intense volcanoes.
“We are looking for how often they erupt, how bright and hot they are, how the shape of the lava flow changes, and how Io’s activity is connected to the flow of charged particles in Jupiter’s magnetosphere,” Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, stated in a press release.
[Related: A mysterious magma ocean could fuel our solar system’s most volcanic world.]
A second shut flyby of Io is scheduled for February 3, 2024, the place Juno will fly inside about 930 miles of the moon’s floor once more. The spacecraft has additionally carried out shut flights close to the of the Jupiterian moons Ganymede and Europa.
“With our pair of close flybys in December and February, Juno will investigate the source of Io’s massive volcanic activity, whether a magma ocean exists underneath its crust, and the importance of tidal forces from Jupiter, which are relentlessly squeezing this tortured moon,” stated Bolton.
Beginning in April, Juno can even carry out a sequence of occultation experiments that use Juno’s Gravity Science experiment to probe the make-up of Jupiter’s higher environment. Studying what supplies compose this half of the planet’s environment ought to present astronomer’s with key information on Jupiter’s form and inside construction. The Juno mission is scheduled to wrap-up in late 2025.