Galileo's still producing discoveries: A magma ocean within Io!

Posted 2011/05/13 11:44 CDT | 0 comments

A fresh report was published online yesterday in Science Express on the discovery of a magma ocean beneath the surface of Io. Big news! This is a paper I've been looking forward to seeing for more than year and half.

Exposing Io's true colors

Posted 2010/08/20 05:15 CDT | 0 comments

Thanks to its active volcanic activity and sulfur-rich surface, Io is one of the most colorful worlds yet seen in the Solar System, save the Earth of course

Voyager 1's mosaic of Io's southern hemisphere

Posted 2013/03/27 | 0 comments

This mosaic consists of 33 separate images acquired by Voyager 1 as it approached for its close flyby of Io on March 5, 1979. Because it took almost an hour to capture all the images, Voyager 1's point of view shifted throughout the imaging; the individual photos have been "reprojected," stretched and warped based on information about Voyager 1's position while capturing each image to fit a common point of view (in this case, it is an orthographic projection, in which the viewpoint is from infinity).

A reconstruction of Io's true color

Posted 2013/03/08 | 0 comments

The left image is a straight red-green-violet color combination from Galileo. The right image has a blue channel synthesized from blue and green filter images (blue = 0.55*green + 0.45*violet) and may be a closer representation of the color that Io would appear to the human observer.

Io, labeled

Posted 2012/06/27 | 0 comments

The images for this full-disk color view of Io were acquired by Galileo during an encounter on July 2, 1999 using the camera's violet, green, and 756-nm near-infrared filters, on Io's anti-Jovian hemisphere.