It’s not a large moon relative to some of its neighbors, but Jupiter’s moon Io is very active, with hundreds of volcanoes erupting lava plumes dozens of miles above its surface, according to NASA. Infrared technology aboard the space agency’s Juno probe mapped two such eruptions in February, returning valuable data about mysterious events beneath Io’s surface. Researchers share their insights on the matter a dissertation Released last week.
About 2,400 miles away, the spacecraft’s Jupiter Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument “showed that Io The entire surface is covered by lava lakes in crater-like features.” For astrophysics. On Earth, a caldera is a crater formed by the collapse of a volcano. Io is about a quarter the diameter of Earth and just slightly larger than the moon.
“In the area of Io’s surface for which we have the most complete data, we estimate that about 3 percent is covered by one of these lava lakes,” Mura said. Juno’s JIRAM tool comes from the Italian space agency Agenzia Spaziale Italiana.
Mulla, lead author of the Io paper, said the probe’s flyby exposed the most common type of volcanic activity on Jupiter’s hottest moon – “giant lava lakes where magma flows up and down.”
He added: “The lava crust was forced through the lake walls, forming the lava rings typical of Hawaiian lava lakes. These walls can be hundreds of meters high, which explains why no magma overflow is usually observed.
Researchers are still poring over data collected from Juno’s flybys of Io (February 2024 and December 2023).
