Io, Still A Mystery Moon Options

[volcanopele]

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000692/

Rosaly Lopes has a new blog post on the Planetary Society blog on the mysteries still surrounding Everyone's Favorite Moon (and if it isn't your favorite moon, then may a giant, falling chunk of komatiite greet you ). She aludes to the upcoming observations by New Horizons to study surface changes and volcanic activity on Io, and to an upcoming book, on Io. The book, Io After Galileo, is currently on Amazon, but rest assured, it will be available until early 2007.

here is a link to the book's Amazon.com page:

http://www.amazon.com/Galileo-Springer-Pra...TF8&s=books

[MarcF]

New data for an old topic:
Three massive volcanic eruptions occurred on Jupiter's moon Io within a two-week period in August of last year.
http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/jupiters-moon...0804/index.html
"We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and they're usually not this bright," said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of one of two papers describing the eruptions. "Here we had three extremely bright outbursts, which suggest that if we looked more frequently we might see many more of them on Io."

"These new events are in a relatively rare class of eruptions on Io because of their size and astonishingly high thermal emission," Davies said. "The amount of energy being emitted by these eruptions implies lava fountains gushing out of fissures at a very large volume per second, forming lava flows that quickly spread over the surface of Io."

Regards,
Marc.