The Volcanoes of Io

An interactive exercise enlisting students


In this exercise we're going to use an infrared picture of Io, taken this morning at the IRTF telescope, to figure out where the biggest volcanic eruption on Io is taking place today. The first image is this morning's infrared view of Io. It's fuzzy because Io is small and far away, but you can see its bright disk, lit up by the sun, and a brighter point of light on the upper right part of the disk, which is the glow of infrared radiation from an enormous hot volcano currently erupting on Io.

The second image is a wide-angle view of Jupiter and its moons taken at about the same time as the infrared one, but from a small telescope down at Kilauea. Io is the moon closest to Jupiter, just to its lower right. The close-up view of Io (made from Voyager spacecraft images) will then show the face of Io that we are seeing from Mauna Kea. When you compare this simulated close-up view of Io with the telescope view, can you see what distinctive feature on the close-up view best corresponds in position with the bright spot in the telescope view? Keep in mind that it probably won't look bright in the simulated view, which was made with visible, not infrared, light. You should find a small but conspicuous black ring at the right location on the simulated view: this is Loki Patera, Io's biggest volcano and the source of the heat radiation that we are seeing this morning at the IRTF. We think Loki is either a crusted-over lake of molten sulfur or a sunken caldera like Kilauea's summit caldera, full of active lava flows. Unlike the Kilauea summit caldera, however, that black ring is larger than the entire Big Island of Hawaii.

Simulated Close-up Images of Io

Presentation of Most Recent Io Images from Hawai'i:

The Volcanoes of Io

--------------------------------------------------

JASON Project Logo

JASON Project homepage || Teachers' Guide || Students' Corner || Search

Gene Carl Feldman (gene@seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov) (301) 286-9428
Todd Carlo Viola, JASON Foundation for Education (todd@jason.org)