![]() This entry was posted in Snapshot by Andrés M. Connerney, Plasma interaction of Io with its plasma torus, 2004. The wave data, new pictures and other information collected recently by NASA's Galileo spacecraft provide insight into what happens above Io's surface, at its colorful volcanoes and inside its hot belly. This means that it always shows the same side to Jupiter. This means it makes an orbit of Jupiter in the same time it takes to rotate once. Just like Earths Moon, Io is tidally locked to its planet. Mafi, GALILEO ORBITER AT JUPITER CALIBRATED MAG HIGH RES V1.0, GO-J-MAG-3-RDR-HIGHRES-V1.0, Technical Report, NASA Planetary Data System, 1997. A great roar of acoustic waves near the north and south poles of Jupiter's moon Io shouts about the power of the volcanic moon. Io Credit: NASA Io is one of Jupiters large moons. *FLUXO ( is an MPI parallel high-order Discontinuous Galerkin code, which supports unstructured curvilinear hexahedral grids, and is able to perform Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR). A 3D model of the moon’s surface developed by NASA was superposed on the simulation results. The Galileo spacecraft is also depicted (not to scale). In yellow is the trajectory of the I31 flyby of the Galileo spacecraft, which visited Io in 2001. The Alfvén wings can be observed as disturbances of both the background magnetic and momentum fields. The existence of an ionosphere and, by inference, an atmosphere, on another Jovian moon, Io, was observed in 1973 during a radio occultation conducted by NASAs. The figure shows the momentum (non-dimensional) and magnetic field of the plasma that surrounds Io, obtained with the magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) plasma model of FLUXO*. This phenomenon creates a pair of Alfvén current tubes that are commonly called Alfvén wings, which have been observed by several flybys. As Io moves inside the plasma torus, elastic collisions of ions and neutrals inside its atmosphere generate a magnetospheric disturbance that propagates away from Io along the background magnetic field lines at the Alfvén wave speed. ![]() Due to its strong volcanic activity, Io expels ions and neutrals, which are in turn ionized by ultraviolet and electron impact ionization, forming a plasma torus around Jupiter. Furthermore, it is embedded in Jupiter’s magnetic field, the largest and most powerful planetary magnetosphere of the solar system. Io is the most volcanically active body of the solar system. ![]()
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