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UA releases new images of Jupiter moon

The images of Io, Jupiter's volcanically active moon, which were taken on the Oct. 10 flyby by the Galileo Spacecraft, were released at the Kuiper Space Science building Friday.

The new data reveals that Io, with a surface covered by more than 100 erupting volcanoes, is the most volcanically active body in the solar system.

Galileo has been in Jupiter's orbit for four years, looking at the planet's moons and magnetic fields.

"What's really unique is that it got close up to Io, because we have been watching it for four years," said Laszlo Keszthelyi, a research associate at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Keszthelyi works with a group of UA graduate students and research associates, each specializing in their own areas of the study of Io, such as the formation of mountains, the colors of the moons, the lava flows and the volcanic calderas.

Alfred McEwen, University of Arizona associate research scientist, is a member of the Galileo imaging team. He has mediated the UA group by planning imaging sequence, and the processing and interpretations of the images taken of Io.

Galileo will be taking more images of Io on its second flyby which is scheduled to take place Wednesday at 9 p.m.

"Galileo will be flying over a different area that we haven't seen much of before, so we're very excited," said Elizabeth Turtle, who specializes in computer modeling of the formation of mountains and impact craters of Io.

Due to intense radiation emitted by Io, scientists believe there is a good chance the radiation will kill the spacecraft.

"The Io flybys were saved until the end of the spacecraft's mission because of the radiation risks," Turtle said.

Jani Radebaugh, a UA grad student, has been studying the volcanic calderas throughout the solar system.

"We can see that there are over 300 craters, which is a lot because they are each so large and Io is such a small body," Radebaugh said.

Paul Geissler, senior research associate, used the new pictures to learn more about the colors of Io, which is what he specializes in.

"We had been wondering why the volcano regions do not appear as white on the map as they usually do," Geissler said. "We learned that the surface is made of two different materials."