Nov 19 1999
From The Space Library
Space News for this day. (3MB PDF)
NASA announced that new data and images, which the Galileo spacecraft had collected on its closest-ever flyby of Jupiter's moon Io on 11 October 1999, revealed that Io, the most volcanic body in the solar system, was "even more active than previously suspected, with more than 100 erupting volcanoes." Data results from the flyby, which brought the spacecraft within 380 miles (611 kilometers) of the moon's surface, had focused on Pele, Loki, and Prometheus, three of Io's most active volcanoes. A close-up image of Pele showed part of the volcano glowing in the dark, with Pele's hot lava behaving similarly to active lava lakes in Hawaii. Galileo's Photopolarimeter Radiometer and Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer had provided detailed temperature maps of Loki, indicating the presence of an enormous caldera repeatedly flooded by lava. New data had clarified the location of lava from Prometheus, erupting, advancing, and producing plumes. NASA's 1979 Voyager mission had observed a plume, and early Galileo images had shown a new lava flow and plume, erupting from a location 60 miles (97 kilometers) west of the area observed during Voyager's mission.
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