Science News reports:
NASA’s Juno orbiter has captured images of a volcanic plume on Jupiter’s moon Io during the mission’s 17th flyby of the giant planet.
Four instruments onboard Juno — a camera called JunoCam, the Stellar Reference Unit, the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph — observed Io for over an hour, providing a glimpse of the moon’s polar regions as well as evidence of an active eruption.
JunoCam acquired the new images of Io on December 21, 2018, at 12:00, 12:15 and 12:20 p.m. GMT before Io entered Jupiter’s shadow.
Space.com reports:
“We knew we were breaking new ground with a multispectral campaign to view Io’s polar region, but no one expected we would get so lucky as to see an active volcanic plume shooting material off the moon’s surface,” Scott Bolton, principal investigator of the Juno mission. “This is quite a New Year’s present, showing us that Juno has the ability to clearly see plumes.”
NASA’s Juno mission spots dramatic volcano eruption on Jupiter moon Io https://t.co/mk8I2KoQZB pic.twitter.com/2KdJbar7Dq
— CNET (@CNET) January 3, 2019