NASA’s Juno spacecraft recently spotted a glassy-smooth lava lake amid the volcanic hellscape of Jupiter’s moon Io.
When Juno’s orbit swooped past Io last December, its cameras captured a mirrorlike reflection from a small patch of the moon’s surface. The strangely shiny landmark turns out to be a lava lake, covered with a thin crust of smooth, gleaming volcanic rock. The rock was probably something like obsidian, a natural glass that forms from cooling magma here on Earth. Known as Loki Patera, the lava lake stretches 127 miles long and is dotted with rocky islands, and its edges glow with heat from the molten magma just beneath the surface.
Loki Patera isn’t the first lava lake scientists have spotted on Io; previous spacecraft, including Galileo (RIP) have also sent home images of similar features, but Juno’s pics are the clearest and most detailed. Based on Juno’s data, NASA created this animation of what a flight over Loki Patera might look like.
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