There are volcanoes erupting hundreds of millions of miles beyond Earth. And a NASA spacecraft is watching it happen.
The space agency’s Juno probe, which has orbited Jupiter since 2016, swooped by the gas giant’s volcanic moon Io last week, its last close planned flyby. The craft captured a world teeming with volcanoes, which you can see in the footage below.
“We’re seeing an incredible amount of detail on the surface,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who researches Io, told Mashable in February after a recent Io flyby. “It’s just a cornucopia of data. It’s just extraordinary.”
These impressive views are processed (removing noise and distortion, etc.) by both professional and amateur image processors, some of whom work for NASA or related space research programs. The darker spots are usually volcanoes or hot spots.
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Two volcanic plumes recently spotted on the Jovian moon Io.
Credit: NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / CC BY 3.0 Unported
The Jovian moon Io, in the foreground, with the ice-clad moon Europa in the distance.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Kevin M. Gill / CC BY 3.0 Unported
The volcanic moon Io as captured on April 9, 2024.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Ted Stryk / CC BY 3.0 Unported
Io is blanketed in erupting volcanoes because it’s relentlessly locked in a tug-of-war between nearby objects, including the colossal Jupiter. “Not only is the biggest planet in the solar system forever pulling at it gravitationally, but so are Io’s Galilean siblings — Europa and the biggest moon in the solar system, Ganymede,” NASA explained in a statement. “The result is that Io is continuously stretched and squeezed, actions linked to the creation of the lava seen erupting from its many volcanoes.”
This volcanic world, a world a little bigger than Earth’s moon, is ceaseless erupting. Just in recent months, Juno observed a hazy plume over the volcano Prometheus. NASA’s Galileo mission also captured a plume above these fields of lava in the year 2000. And the first-ever observations of Io, captured by the pioneering Voyager 1 craft, spotted at least eight different active volcanoes.
Indeed, it’s a land of lava, plumes, and extreme eruptions.
