Using data from the Juno mission that has been studying the Jupiter system since 2016, NASA researchers have created an animation of an island in the middle of a vast lava lake on the moon Jupiter.
Since the time of the Voyager missions, planetary scientists have known that Io, one of Jupiter’s four large moons, has more intense volcanic activity than any other body in the Solar System.
Lava jets from hundreds of volcanoes spew sulfur and lava thousands of kilometers high.
In December 2023 and this February, Juno made two extremely close passes of Ius’ surface, coming within about 1,500 kilometers. The images revealed the moon’s northern latitudes for the first time.
“Io is covered in volcanoes, and we’ve caught some of them in action,” said NASA’s Scott Bolton, principal investigator of the Juno mission, who presented the latest findings at a European Geophysical Society conference in Vienna.
“We also took some amazing close-ups of a lava lake called Loki Patera, which is 200 kilometers long,” Bolton said in a NASA statement.
The scarred surface of the Virus in a Juno image (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS)
A large island, covered with volcanic deposits, stands out in the middle of the heated lake, the surface of which is “smooth almost like glass.”
The heat that fuels Ius’ extreme volcanic activity comes from the gravitational effects of Jupiter and its other large moons. Gravitational pull causes a kind of tide that distorts the interior of the satellite and creates internal friction that releases heat.
Dozens of hot spots visible in Juno’s infrared image of Europa (NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SWRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM)
According to recent observations, Io has remained volcanically active since its formation about 4.6 billion years ago.
