The Watchers - 17 April 2013 - BY HEISENBERG
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in the Solar System. It has hundreds of volcanoes and volcanic activity 25 times that of Earth. However, according to NASA and European Space Agency researchers, the concentrations of volcanic activity are significantly displaced from where they are expected to be based on models that predict how the moon’s interior is heated.
The team, which includes Rosaly Lopes of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., primarily used data from NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions. Their new paper also analyzes data from other spacecraft and ground-based telescopes, but much of what scientists know about Io’s surface comes from these two missions. Voyager, still being managed by JPL, discovered Io’s volcanoes in 1979, making that moon the only body in the solar system other than Earth known to have active magma volcanoes at the time. Galileo, which was also a JPL mission, flew by Io in 1999 and 2000.
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