Juno checks out fiery Io

[bjdeming]

A "firehose of data" is due for arrival tonight as Juno swoops in less than 400 miles above the Jovian moon Io, which is incredibly volcanic thanks to land tides caused by interactions with nearby Jupiter.

Here's the mission page, where raw images are already up.

 

[bjdeming]

Images are already coming in (Jason tweeted that he wasn't expecting them until the 3rd, so he's rearranging plans).

Io is...not a pretty place. But this is how it looked from about 1,500 miles up earlier today:

Again, that volcanism is from Jupiter's gravitational pull really messing up the moon's rocky innards.

Reportedly, some volcanoes are so big you can see their eruptions from Earth if viewing circumstances are good, you know where to look, and you've got the right equipment (three big "if's," so, yay, Juno Cam!).

This is from eight years ago, now we're getting same-day closeups, with about another thousand miles or so to zoom in.




I think that's Loki Volcano in the lower right quadrant of today's image, and it's not erupting at the moment.