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NASA’s Juno spacecraft recently swooped by the most powerful volcano in our solar system, on the most volcanic world known to exist.
The space agency captured detailed views of the over 127-mile (200-kilometer) wide volcano, which has created an expansive lava lake. It’s a volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io, called Loki Patera. “It’s absolutely stunning, stunning imagery,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who researches Io, told Mashable earlier this year. Now, the agency has used the imagery to create an animation of what this extreme volcanic environment looks like from the Jovian moon.
It’s both a hellish and majestic space scene. At the end of the short clip, you can see how the dominant gas giant Jupiter looms in the distance.
NASA scientist viewed first Voyager images. What he saw gave him chills.
“There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava,” Scott Bolton, the Juno mission’s principal investigator, said in a statement. “The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.” (The lava field is likely covered with a smooth or glassy crust.)
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Björn Jónsson CC NC SA
Io is blanketed in hundreds of erupting volcanoes because it’s relentlessly locked in a tug-of-war between nearby objects, including the colossal Jupiter.
“Not only is the biggest planet in the solar system forever pulling at it gravitationally, but so are Io’s Galilean siblings — Europa and the biggest moon in the solar system, Ganymede,” NASA explained in a statement. “The result is that Io is continuously stretched and squeezed, actions linked to the creation of the lava seen erupting from its many volcanoes.”
It’s a wild solar system out there. We’re learning a lot — and will soon learn a lot more.
