Amira Shehata wrote Friday, October 20, 2023 11:00 PM
NASA’s Juno mission has captured new views of the Moon Jupiter Io and its lava-filled surface, during its final flyby as Juno passed near Jupiter’s fifth moon, the most volcanically active body in the solar system.
According to the “space” website, the surface of the moon appears to be dyed with swirls of light and dark spots and large areas of molten red spots in new images shared by NASA on the X website (formerly Twitter).
Picture of planet Mars and the moon
Volcanic activity on Io has created lakes of molten silicate lava on its surface, and dark, molten red spots can be seen spreading across the moon in detailed new images from Juno, which were processed by citizen scientists using raw data captured by the spacecraft.
Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, and is home to hundreds of volcanoes that regularly erupt with molten lava, spewing plumes of sulfur gas hundreds of miles up into the atmosphere, which can be seen with large telescopes on Earth.
Jupiter’s moon
Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has a total of 92 moons. Io is slightly larger than Earth’s moon and the fourth largest moon in the solar system. It is the third largest moon of Jupiter. The data collected by the JunoCam instrument was used during the flyby. To create these shots of the volcanic moon, capturing its surface from different angles as the spacecraft passes overhead.
