The Volcanoes of Io

An interactive exercise enlisting students

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

• Display all the close-up images
• See an mpeg animation (158 kbytes) of Io's rotation

Presentation of Most Recent Io Images from Hawai'i:

• Most recent Io images from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea
• Blowup of Io eruption image (March 2, 1995)
• Most recent Jupiter images from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea
• Most recent Io images from the ground-based telescope at the broadcast site
• Directory of all available images