This extraterrestrial photo shoot was far from lo-fi.
NASA’s Juno mission passed within 930 miles of Jupiter’s volcanic third-largest moon on Saturday, capturing stunning images of the solar system’s most volcanic world.
The spacecraft is in the third year of its mission to document the giant planet and up to 95 of its officially recognized moons, as active volcanoes send huge plumes of debris into its ultra-thin sulfur dioxide atmosphere. I took a picture of it being blown away.
Breathtaking footage of the cratered Moon and its hundreds of volcanoes and lava lakes. See gallery on Sky & Telescope.
Juno, the first solar-powered mission in the outer solar system, made a similar approach to Galileo’s innermost moon in December, and its latest pass reached the giant planet’s 58th orbit, during which it captured the first satellite. According to NASA, images of Ro’s north and south poles have never been seen before.
The spacecraft was scheduled to monitor Jupiter’s magnetic field and interior seven more times from further afield before its mission ended, and recently made a close approach to the gas giant.
“By combining data from this flyby with previous observations, Juno’s science team will be able to predict how Io’s volcanoes will change,” said Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “We are researching this,” he said at NASA. press release last month.
“We need to 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 are investigating whether they are related.”
Bolton said scientists are also looking at “the importance of the tidal forces from Jupiter that are relentlessly squeezing this beleaguered moon.”
The Junocam spacecraft suffered radiation exposure during its final approach to the planet, but was repaired by engineers who warmed up the camera using its internal heater.
lo is slightly larger than Earth’s moon, with a surface temperature of -202 degrees Celsius, but its interior is heated by the tidal forces of Jupiter’s massive gravitational field, and its volcanic temperatures can exceed 3,000 degrees Celsius. According to Space.com.
The volcano spews charged particles into a region with a high concentration of ions and electrons located in Io’s orbital Io plasma torus that returns to the planet via magnetic field lines.
This object orbits Jupiter in less than two Earth days, but it does not rotate because its tidal forces are locked to Jupiter.
Juno’s latest pass was the first spacecraft to ever come this close to the moon. Galileo’s mission reportedly brought him within 112 miles of the Moon in 2001.
