One 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.

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.

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.

Check out this great animation found on the internet a while back that was compiled from images taken by the Cassini probe as it flew by Jupiter at the tail end of 2000. It used to be hosted at a U.S. astrogeology site which no longer exists and the animation was credited to Paul Geissler. Those glowing dots are active volcanoes. At the very end there is a blast of light from a crescent Io coming into view. The features are strikingly similar to those of the “dark side” image of Io published here during the New Horizons encounter, including the “auroral displays in Io’s tenuous atmosphere interacting with Jupiter’s magnetosphere”.

NOTE: The animation was cleaned up a bit by wanderingspace.net just for presentation purposes. This mostly included increasing the canvas size, removing all the surrounding noise and darkening the disc of Io itself.

Just looking at the New Horizon images of Io from last year. There were a bunch Io images posted here during that flyby… but i like especially the tiny small plume you can see sharply on the left edge of Io (seen blown out on this post). Most images placed an emphasis on the larger Tvashtar Volcano seen top, left of center.

The New Horizons team has made all the MVIC (Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera) images as well as the LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) images from the Jupiter encounter available for imagers to kick around. The above image is by Gordan Ugarkovic and is apparently a “colorized” version of a monochrome he created using earth based observations of the planet from around the same time. In addition to the two moons (and a shadow), also visible are both the Great Red Spot as well as the “Red Junior” spot which has in recent months has become a new notable feature of Jupiter.

If I am going to keep making these things… I’d be a fool to not include a set for the Apple iPhone. Coincidentally, when you purchase your iPhone and do not yet have a phone service, the phone displays a full-disc image of the Earth pretty much displayed exactly as these do when uploaded to your iPhone. So in the spirit of continuity, you can now opt instead to have Mercury, Venus, Earth, The Moon (Luna), Mars, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Saturn, Enceladus, Titan, Iapetus, Hyperion, Uranus, Miranda, Neptune or Triton grace your screen instead of the default Earth.

The easiest way to install wallpapers to your iPhone is to make a special set in iPhoto and simply drag all the files to that folder. Then in iTunes have your iPhone sync that folder to your photos collection. After that it is as simple as opening the “Photos” area of your iPhone. Go to your new folder of images and open whichever image you want. Then tap on the image just once and assign it as a wallpaper using the “Use as Wallpaper” button in the lower left corner of the screen.

If you have a PC I have no idea in hell how the hell you get images into your iPhone. I would buy a Mac… you have an iPhone and use iTunes… you are half-way there.

For a version of these with no graphics see this link.

The moons of Jupiter (well, the 4 major ones) are in their own right, a Solar System within a Solar System. There is volcanically explosive Io; Europa with its cracks and ridges hinting at its huge internal ocean; Ganymede the largest moon in our celestial neighborhood and Callisto one the most heavily cratered bodies we have anywhere. The 4 moons are also called the Galilean moons as they were discovered by Galileo and have since been revealed to be more fascinating than most planets are. The images below represent what I think are likely the best representative images of these places that can fill a 2560×1600 screen. At this size, the details are quite impressive… do take a look even if you can’t make use of the images as wallpaper images.

The Europa image is actually a render created by Tayfun Öner as not that many satisfactory images exist of a full globe Europa. Many great images exist of Ganymede but most are low resolutions, this image was stitched together by Ted Stryk of www.unmannedspaceflight.com. The other two are officially released NASA composites.

Download the zipped files here

This is a bit old taken from February 2007’s New Horizons encounter at Jupiter. A very noisy image was released of Io on the dark side of Jupiter that illustrated the glowing lights of lava flows and auroral displays in Io’s tenuous atmosphere interacting with Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Noise always bothers me and there has been a desire to somehow clean up the presentation of this fantastic image.

The process was simply to blur the image, layer highlight information a few times with varying degrees of sharpness or blur and to simply hand remove what would seem to be simply noise artifacts. The problem is that some of this information wasn’t just noise, but is actually auroral glow (especially at the disk edge). So after some of the noise was removed it was softened and re-introduced selectively around active areas where the assumption is that the glow near these spots is more intense. The final step was to simply reduce the file size so that it became sharper.

This presentation is purely artistic although it does come from real image data… I just wouldn’t use it to support any scientific papers. The items marked simply as “volcano” were newly discovered by New Horizons.

This animated gif has been making the rounds lately… It is composed of 5 images taken by New Horizons as it sped past Jupiter in February. Of course, 5 frames go by pretty quickly and do not really allow us any time to appreciate the motion. So I did a really simple thing and added a whole bunch more frames in between the 5 primary images then simply faded them into one another. This creates the illusion of a smoother and longer animation, but really you are still only seeing 5 total images. I tried faking a loop from frame 5 back to 1, but that was near impossible and not really an honest representation of what New Horizons saw.

Two impressive images from the New Horizons mission as it sped past Jupiter last February. Releases sure are taking time… they must be coming back in on e pixel a day!

Best detail yet seen on a volcanic plume on Io

Europa seen rising Apollo style over the edge of Jupiter.

New Horizons has some sensitive vision for its investigation of the Pluto system. Because there is so little light at Pluto (comparitively), when looking back at Io and Europa it was able to capture this image with what looks like a considerable amount of “jupitershine” reflecting off of Io. Normally this kind of reflection is quite subtle. Furthermore, the reason Europa has no “jupitershine” is because it is closer to New Horizons on the dark side of Jupiter and Io is further away on the sunlit side of Jupiter… therefore capturing some light bouncing off the cloud tops.

Yes, the blue thing on Io is a volcano.

As New Horizons swung by Jupiter a few days ago, we got a good look at some new volcanic activity on Io. There are at least 3 active plumes seen in this image which is lit by both the Sun and Jupiter reflection (the New Horizon cameras were designed for the low light expected at Pluto). The largest one seen here, Tvashtar, represents the best detail we have ever aquired of an active volcano on Io… even compared to those of Galileo. The secondary plume at 9 0’clock is Prometheus and the third one, Masubi, is inset around 6 o’clock catching the light of the Sun on the dark side of Io.

This will be the last image of an early handful as the spacecraft is simply too busy recording data to turn around and face the Earth to talk to us. More images will be released in the coming weeks as activities die down and the spacecraft has less to record. Sadly, once the full stream of data is returned to Earth from this encounter – it will be the last up-close images we will see of Jupiter and its moons for at least 15 years as no new missions to Jupiter have yet been assigned. Based on previous experience, any new proposed missions to the outer Solar System will take at least 12 years to concieve, approve and build (especially depending upon its complexity). I only pray that I live to see the day that we go beneath the icy crust of Europa and take a fantastic other-worldly-under-sea voyage to a place that may be the only environment in our solar system hospitable to evolving life.

As New Horizons makes its closest approach to Jupiter, we are already seeing considerable activity from a volcano known as Tvashtar. This comes of no surprise as this was detected a few weeks back when scientists maintained observations of Io through the Hubble Space Telescope in preparation for this event. This is already the best image of an active volcano eruption on Io since the Voyager flybys in 1975 (revealed through over-exposure). Details here are somewhat greater than those taken by Galileo or Cassini and are expected to only get better before all the data is in.

A composite image of some very active lava flows on Jupiter’s moon Io.

Gordan Ugarkovic has a great collection of reworked Cassini images on Flickr. I contacted Gordan about showing some of his images here on wanderingspace and he was ever so gracious. As many people Gordan is “somewhat underwhelmed by the frequency the Cassini Imaging Team releases color composites”, so it is up to excellent freelancers like him to compile this information from the data files which are made public by NASA. Problem is that these images rarely make it to the mass media and we are stuck with the dozen or so color images the NASA imaging teams decide to produce in a year.

WALLPAPER NOTE: The left 1/3 of the “Three Moons” image was extended in Photoshop using data at the edges of the original image which was cropped to a square format. This “fake” imagery was only applied to that area of the rings and the rest of the image including the moons is actual.

Here are some other images from Gordan which are some of my favorites, but don’t trust my editing… go to the gallery and have a look yourself. For the sake of posterity I have added a permanent link to his gallery on the right side of this blog where you may note that there are already a few others linked. There were two additional ones but the sites have been taken down since I linked to them?! Hopefully the three left will stick around for a while and I will in time add more to the collection.

Tethys and Saturn’s Hazy Limb

Mimas and Prometheus on Rings

Io on Jupiters Edge

This caldera is named Tvashtar Catena and was imaged in 2000. Earlier in 1999 the region appeared as seen at below-left. Clearly the progress made in a volcanic year on Io is incredible… just for reference, the region pictured here is larger tha the Grand Canyon here on Earth. Imagine something that large here on Earth changing that much in one year.

Io stands alone in our Solar System in terms of geological activity, but an interesting relationship can be drawn from what is seen on Io and what is seen in Europa’s internal ocean. The same stresses coming from Jupiter which heat and tear Io apart are the same ones, which at a safer distance, internally heat Europa’s oceans. Leading us to believe that had Io been even closer to Jupiter its very stability would come into question. Looking further out at Ganymede, evidence suggests that it may as well experience some of this internal heating and could also contain a vast water ocean much further below a thinker icy crust than Europa. The right 1/3 of this image was generated based upon textures in the main image to the left (hence the lack of any details). So only the left 2/3 of this image is actual. I added the rest simply to fill out the proportion for the wallpaper. There may for all I know be a vast mountain range that begins in that area, but alas… i have depicted it as flat. But the rest is the real deal my friend.