You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
« Martian Avalanche!
Martian Moon Phobos »

An Ionian Blog

Io as seen by PioneerOne of the most fascinating places in the Solar System to study would have to be the Jupiter moon Io. Previous to Voyager, the only image of Io available would be this image (at left) taken by the Pioneer 11 mission in 1974 which only hinted at what was to come with its slightly orange hue. Beyond this most scientists thought that Io would be another highly cratered and dusty moon very much like our own until Voyager returned its first highly detailed images. You can only image the shock of mission specialists when they got a look at this yellow, red and white pizza moon which was completely void of any sign of cratering.

Galileo at Io 32nd Orbit by Jason Perry

As it turned out, Io happens to be the most highly volcanic body in the entire Solar System. Enter the Galileo mission of the 90’s which stuck around for a while staying in orbit around Jupiter and not just driving by. Jason Perry is part of the Cassini Mission imaging team and has been re-processing these Galileo images of Io in his spare time. He has posted a large collection of these images as well as publishing a blog that specializes on all things Io and the images selected here are some of Jason’s recently processed favorites.

Galileo at Io 14th Orbit by Jason Perry

These two images are natural color images and most likely best represent what the human eye might see out the portal window of their spacecraft. When asked what he might like to say about these images to a general audience Jason responded, “The colors you see in these two images are largely the result of sulfur and related compounds. Sulfur on Io produced the general yellowish color of much of the surface. The reddish color of the polar regions is the result of radiation-damaged* sulfur. The whitish areas on the surface are the result of Sulfur dioxide: an industrial pollutant on Earth, a frost on Io.” Good information to mention about a highly volcanic moon as many people probably assume that all that red and yellow is similar to the molten rock images you see from here on Earth.

* Jupiter’s magnetosphere traps the solar wind which produces a large amount of radiation. Io orbits within a region that is highly saturated by this radiation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 1:36 am and is filed under Historic Missions, Io. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “An Ionian Blog”

  1. Artyom Says:
    March 6th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    Thanks for the great post! An thank you for updating more often ;-)

  2. thomas Says:
    March 6th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

    I post whenever the missions provide, or i stumble upon hidden internet greatness. I will never give up!

  3. Gordan Says:
    March 7th, 2008 at 9:37 am

    “Io orbits within a region that is highly saturated by this radiation whereas Europa (the next large moon out) receives very little.”

    Rest assured, Europa gets hammered hard as well. So hard, in fact, that any future Europa orbiter that gets there will have to have *significant* radiation shielding. It’s not a weak radiation environment, not by a longshot. Weak compared to Io’s environment only!

  4. thomas Says:
    March 7th, 2008 at 11:14 am

    is that what leads to some of the internal heating… or is that more the tidal forces?

  5. Gordan Says:
    March 8th, 2008 at 11:35 am

    Tidal forces, the radiation environment is related to the strong magnetic field.

  6. Gordan Says:
    March 8th, 2008 at 11:38 am

    It’s not really that Jupiter emits the radiation (these are mostly energetic electrons and ionized heavier ions), it’s solar wind trapped in the planet’s enormous magnetosphere. The Io torus just adds fuel to the fire so to speak, providing additional plasma.

Leave a Reply