While in the second year of its exploration of Jupiter’s inner moons, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has sent back a treasure of details about the Jovian moons Ganymede and Europa. Now, the mission is poised to take pictures of the Jovian moon Io, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanic place in the solar system according to NASA and will have Juno’s full attention for the next one and a half years. On December 15, the mission will conduct the first of nine flybys planned during the period. Two of these nine will have the spacecraft cruising at a distance of just 1,500 kilometres above the moon’s surface.
Mission scientists will take advantage of these flybys to perform what will be the first high-resolution monitoring campaign of Io, studying its volcanoes and how its volcanic eruptions interact with Jupiter’s magnetosphere and aurora.
Jupiter’s volcanic moon: Io is slightly larger than the Earth’s Moon and has a diameter that is about one-quarter that of our planet. Io is tidally locked to Jupiter, meaning that one side of the Moon always faces the planet. It takes around 1.8 Earth days to both rotate on its axis and revolve once around Jupiter.
It has a very thin atmosphere that is primarily made of sulphur dioxide but one of the most interesting features of the Jovian moons is its volcanoes. The most volcanically active world in the solar system has hundreds of volcanoes with some erupting fountains of lava that are dozens of kilometres high. It even has lakes of molten silicon lava on its surface.
The volcanic moon also had an important in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where astronauts conduct a dangerous spacewalk above its volcanoes to board an abandoned spacecraft.
