Io’s Tvashtar Volcano

To get things going again, I thought I’d start posting some of my favorite space images – and what could be better than this animated sequence of 5 images of the plume of Tvashtar volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io:

Io's Tvashtar Volcano
Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

This sequence of images was captured by the New Horizons spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as it passed by Jupiter on its way to Pluto.The plume extends 330 kilometers (200 miles) above the moon’s surface. Only the upper part of the plume is visible  – the plume’s source is 130 kilometers (80 miles) below the edge of Io's disk,  on the far side of the moon.The five images were obtained over an 8-minute span, with two minutes between frames, on March 1, 2007.  Io was 3.8 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from New Horizons. More information on the New Horizons can be found at JPL's New Horizons Plut-Kuiper Belt mission website.

Posted on June 23, 2009
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