By Rick Adams
14, Sep 2024
One of the most volcanic planets in our solar system has a brand new volcano to add to its list. And its lava flows are gigantic.
Io, which is Jupiter’s adolescent moon that is sprinkled with molten, is a target of detection by dozens of reckoning spacecraft and preparative examinations leading to images that show transformations on the surface.
Recently, the Juno mission of NASA flew closer to Io than in the last twenty years. The 2024 views depict a live volcano and the area in the picture was just lifeless terrain in the earlier part of the twentieth century.
“Recent JunoCam images indicate many changes on Io, including this large, intricate volcanic structure that was not there before 1997,” Michael Ravine, the advanced project manager at Malin Space Science Systems, which oversees work on the JunoCam instrument, said in a statement.
The discovery was made and has been just reported at the 2024 Europlanet Science Congress.
Thousands of lava flows have evidently issued from this new volcano; the two strong flows are descending about 100 kilometers (62 statute miles) to the left of the vent.
In another graphic illustration below pinpointing the exact location of Berlin on a map of Germany, the lava would overshadow a fairly large area of the country.
When lava has stopped flowing and has formed ponds, the heat from the melt rock produced those two gray circles when any surface material got vaporized into space.
The black-and-white image was taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1997, whereas Juno images are from February 2024. Its whole extent of the volcanic feature covers an area of approximately 180 km by 180 km (112 miles by 112 miles).