NASA is unraveling Io’s volcanic secrets.
The space agency’s Juno spacecraft has been swooping progressively closer to Jupiter’s profoundly volcanic moon Io, and its observations reveal the full scope of this lava world’s volcanoes. Juno, with instruments that both capture rich imagery and measure heat emanating from the moon’s surface, flew over Io’s little-known poles in recent years, giving planetary scientists views of these volcanoes — and bringing them closer to an understanding of what’s transpiring beneath Io’s tortured surface.
“It is the purest form of discovery,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who researches Io, told Mashable. “We’re seeing things that we have never seen before.”
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