NASA announced over the holiday weekend new image Jupiter’s icy volcanic moon Io.Juno spacecraft flew roughly inside 930 miles It photographed the surface of a celestial body on December 30, 2023, capturing an image showing an unstable and pockmarked moon.
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The JunoCam imager captured a new image. They depict red spheres dotted with giant gray volcanoes. Io is thought to be the most volcanic world in the solar system.By comparison, Earth sees about 50 eruptions each year, and Io There may be 100 times more volcanic activity.Jupiter’s gravity It is the main cause of Io’s volcanic activity. The tug-of-war between this large planet and the additional gravitational effects of Jupiter’s other giant moons, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto, intensifies Io’s frictional tidal heating.It will take about this month 42 hours to go around Jupiterand the enormous heat generated during orbit likely creates an ocean of magma beneath Io’s surface, promoting eruptions.
According to NASA, this was the closest flight since Io’s similar flight. Galileo spacecraft in October 2001. The Juno spacecraft, launched in 2011, entered Jupiter’s orbit for the first time in 2016. The spacecraft is the first to peer beneath the gas giant’s dense clouds, on a mission to study the origins of the solar system’s largest planet and the entire solar system. The Juno mission monitors the moon’s volcanic activity from a distance of about 10,830 miles to more than 62,100 miles. The research team hopes that the information collected during the December flyby and the mission’s previous observations will help them learn more about these violent volcanoes.
“We know how often lava erupts, how bright and hot it is, how the shape of lava flows changes, and how Io’s activity interacts with the flow of charged particles in Jupiter’s magnetosphere. We’re looking to see if there’s a connection,” said Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton. Southwest Research Institute, stated in a statement.
[Related: A mysterious magma ocean could fuel our solar system’s most volcanic world.]
a Io’s second flyby is scheduled for February 3, 2024., where Juno will again fly within about 930 miles of the moon’s surface. The spacecraft also flew close to Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and Europa.
“Two flybys in December and February revealed that Juno was able to determine the source of Io’s massive volcanic activity, whether there is an ocean of magma beneath the Earth’s crust, and the pressure on the beleaguered moon that is relentlessly compressing the planet. “We plan to investigate the importance of tidal forces from Jupiter,” Bolton said.
From April, Juno also performs a series of occultation experiments using Juno’s. gravity science experiment to investigate the composition of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Studying the materials that make up this part of the planet’s atmosphere should give astronomers important data about Jupiter’s shape and internal structure. Juno’s mission is scheduled to end at the end of 2025.
