Pic Of The Day (23 Oct)

Event Horizon · 23 Oct 2002 at 08:06

Full size Image.

How big is the Jupiter moon Io? The most volcanic body in the Solar System, Io (usually pronounced "EYE-oh") is 3,600 kilometers in diameter, about the size of planet Earth's moon.

Gliding past Jupiter at the turn of the millennium, the Cassini spacecraft captured this awe inspiring view of active Io with the largest gas giant as a backdrop, offering a stunning demonstration of the ruling planet's relative size. Although in the picture Io appears to be located just in front of the swirling Jovian clouds, Io hurtles around its orbit once every 42 hours at a distance of 420,000 kilometers or so from the center of Jupiter. That puts it nearly 350,000 kilometers above Jupiter's cloud tops, roughly equivalent to the distance between Earth and Moon. The Cassini spacecraft itself was about 10 million kilometers from Jupiter when recording the image data.

Event Horizon · 23 Oct 2002 at 18:03

It really is a beautiful image isn't it, just goes to show that the natural world can be more stunning than anything produced by a human.

Can you imagine that one day, humans may visit, or even populate that moon, what would it be like to sit and watch the violent dust storms on Jupiter of an evening..

Glad you liked it

Event Horizon · 23 Oct 2002 at 19:02

Originally posted by Augmented
Wow... That's a goodun!
Almost like a fractal in a way.
Io seems like it's affecting/pushing the flow of the clouds, does it exert enough gravitational force to do this?

No afaik it has almost no effect on Jupiter itself.

However....

Europa and Ganymede's gravitational pull (two other moons of Jupiter) on Io is so strong, the moon stretches and contorts so that its overall diameter changes as much as 100M, this leads to frictional heating and massive volcanic activity on the surface and subcontinent. IIRC the average surface temp on Io is around 130K however hot spots exist on the surface exceeding 2000K..that's hot.

From what we know so far there is little or no water on Io and the atmosphere is a thin mix of sulphur dioxide and other trace gasses.

Here is a very nice image of Io, you can see the plume of smoke trailing from the vent of a huge volcano.

Event Horizon · 24 Oct 2002 at 00:49

Originally posted by walsherz
Its that good the wonderful mr kaiowas has knocked me up (oo-er) a nice siggy.

Keep the good pics comming EV

That m8, looks dam fine! I didnt think about turning that into a sig, but im glad someone did