New Horizons at Io Options

[volcanopele]

Looking at that image again, perhaps one should be on the look out for a plume at Hephaestus Patera...

[volcanopele]

Rather than upload a new movie here ever time a new LORRI image shows up, I'm just going to put it at:

http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/Io_movie.gif

[nprev]

Terrific, VP; thanks!

[john_s]

Now we have an "proper" movie of the Tvashtar plume- here's the animated GIF:



See http://www.pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missio...ges/051407.html for more details...

John.

[tedstryk]

Bravo!!!!!

[remcook]

!! that's my second 'wow' in less than 5 minutes. i love this place.

WOW!

[volcanopele]

VERY SWEET!!

Just flipping through the SOC images too, there are definitely two plumes at Masubi. Nice to know I wasn't crazy...

[volcanopele]

Masubi's two plumes:

[volcanopele]

Here is a graphic illustrating the changes at Masubi, and the sources of the two plumes:



The images on the left are from New Horizons and show the new lava flow emanating from the Masubi source region. The source region is the origin of the northern of the two plumes. The southern of the two plumes comes from the flow front of the new lobe of Masubi Fluctus. The image on the right is from Galileo (orbit C9, June 1997). The last Galileo image of the region, taken in August 1999, shows a plume deposit surrounding the source region.

[babakm]

Wow here too.

[volcanopele]

Well, after a little work, I found the vent:

This of course assumes that the bright spot is a hotspot (similar to those seen by SSI on Galileo, though LORRI doesn't have the same wavelength response, only sensing up to 850 nm IIRC).

So what do we know about this area? Well, the source appears to be in the far left patera of Tvashtar Paterae. See http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03529 for a good image of this region. In particular, the glowing spot appears to be localized within the dolphin-shaped flow along the southern and eastern margin of this patera. A temperature map from the 2000/2001 eruption at this flow can be seen at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02594. Strangely enough, despite the energetic eruption that year, the morphology of the flow didn't change from before the eruption (see http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02584 if you don't believe me). It definitely would seem that eruptions at this lava flow produce quite a bit of pyroclastic material, producing a dark deposit in the immediate vicinity of the flow and a giant plume producing a red ring distally.

Okay, I gave this another go. After very carefully matching up an Io basemap to the Ihires6 sequence of images (like this one: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPho.../050107_02.html ), it looks like the vent is actually a little further to the east than I proposed earlier. I now think that it is at the Galileo I25 lava curtain location (see http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/io_i...5ISGIANTS01.png )

I'll post a more complete work-up when later tonight.

[volcanopele]

As promised:



The image on the left is from lor_0034981639_0x630_sci_1 . This image shows a hotspot at Tvashtar, likely the source of the large plume. The image on the right is the USGS basemap reprojected to the same geometry as the LORRI image. By blinking the two images, I was able to pinpoint the hotspot to the location marked by the blue point near the top of the right hand image. This suggests that the hotspot is at the same location as a 25-km long fire fountain seen by Galileo in November 1999. This identification is supported by the history of this location in producing a hotspot visible in clear filter images, at low exposure times, in broad daylight. The error window for this hotspot is about twice the size of the spot, since I don't know the exact resolution and central lat and lon leading to slight diferences between the two images.

[nprev]

Late to the party re the plume movie..."wow" don't cut it, gotta bust loose with a <CLINK!!!> What a sight...

[mchan]

*clink* in the swear box. 1st in some weeks. Still spectacular after reading the notes and figuring a ~10**3X speedup.

[AndyG]

Lovely animation! And if the plume's about 250km high, then the gunk is rocketing out of Io at around ... ummm ... 900 m/s.



<clink><clink><clink>

Andy