NASA Probe Spies Plumes Above Jupiter Moon's Lava Lakes

It’s not a large satellite comparative to immoderate of its neighbors, but Jupiter’s Io is exceedingly active, with volcanoes by the hundreds spewing lava plumes dozens of miles supra its surface, per NASA. Infrared tech aboard the abstraction agency’s Juno probe mapped 2 specified eruptions successful February, returning invaluable information connected the mysterious happenings beneath Io’s surface. Researchers shared their insights connected the substance successful a paper published past week.

From astir 2,400 miles away, the probe’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrumentality “revealed that the full aboveground of Io is covered by lava lakes contained successful caldera-like features,” explained Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from Rome’s National Institute for Astrophysics. On Earth, a caldera is simply a crater formed by a collapsing volcano. Io is astir a 4th the size of Earth by diameter, and conscionable a spot bigger than Earth’s moon.

“In the portion of Io’s aboveground successful which we person the astir implicit data, we estimation astir 3% of it is covered by 1 of these molten lava lakes,” said Mura. Juno’s JIRAM instrumentality came via Italy’s abstraction agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana.

According to Mura, pb writer of the Io paper, the probe’s flybys exposure the astir communal benignant of volcanism connected Jupiter’s hottest satellite — “enormous lakes of lava wherever magma goes up and down.”

He added, “The lava crust is forced to interruption against the walls of the lake, forming the emblematic lava ringing seen successful Hawaiian lava lakes. The walls are apt hundreds of meters high, which explains wherefore magma is mostly not observed spilling out.”

Researchers are inactive poring implicit the information collected by Juno’s Io flybys, which occurred successful February 2024 and December 2023.