

#Io moon info full
While the new data are full of these and other mysteries, they are also a “gift to the planetary science community,” says study coauthor Ashley Davies, a volcanologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ( Explore the many intriguing moons of the solar system in our interactive atlas.) Volcanoes don’t seem to be in the right places, the brightest eruptions seem largely confined to just one hemisphere, and Loki Patera-a 8,100-square-mile depression filled with lava-steadfastly refuses to play by anyone’s rules. The research also confirms that Io is even stranger and more difficult to explain than anyone thought. Their work, recently published in The Astronomical Journal, reminds us how far we’ve come since Voyager delivered those first grainy images of plumes on Io. Now, scientists pouring over five years’ worth of images taken from the top of a Hawaiian volcano have unveiled the most detailed atlas yet of this unusual moon. Io’s powerful eruptions can produce plumes of epic proportions, sometimes reaching heights of 300 miles. Some of its hundreds of fiery craters are many times more expansive than our largest cities.

Roughly 40 years ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft sailed past one of Jupiter’s large moons, and it revealed something amazing: The rocky moon, called Io, is a volcanic champion, featuring the first erupting volcanoes seen anywhere other than Earth.
