NASA’s Juno Probe Spies Plumes Above Jupiter Moon’s Lava Lakes

It’s not a giant moon relative to a few of its neighbors, however Jupiter’s Io is exceedingly lively, with volcanoes by the tons of spewing lava plumes dozens of miles above its floor, per NASA. Infrared tech aboard the area company’s Juno probe mapped two such eruptions in February, returning beneficial information on the mysterious happenings beneath Io’s floor. Researchers shared their insights on the matter in a paper revealed final week.

From round 2,400 miles away, the probe’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument “revealed that the entire floor of Io is roofed by lava lakes contained in caldera-like options,” defined Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from Rome’s Nationwide Institute for Astrophysics. On Earth, a caldera is a crater fashioned by a collapsing volcano. Io is a few quarter the scale of Earth by diameter, and only a bit larger than Earth’s moon.

“Within the area of Io’s floor wherein now we have essentially the most full information, we estimate about 3% of it’s lined by one in all these molten lava lakes,” stated Mura. Juno’s JIRAM instrument got here through Italy’s area company, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana.

Based on Mura, lead writer of the Io paper, the probe’s flybys expose the most typical sort of volcanism on Jupiter’s hottest moon — “monumental lakes of lava the place magma goes up and down.”

He added, “The lava crust is pressured to interrupt in opposition to the partitions of the lake, forming the everyday lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes. The partitions are seemingly tons of of meters excessive, which explains why magma is usually not noticed spilling out.”

Researchers are nonetheless poring over the information collected by Juno’s Io flybys, which occurred in February 2024 and December 2023.