Geographic Update From Io

We recently learned more about how Earth looks from Space Now, Galileo buzzes a volcano. Gogo Dodo writes: "The Galileo spacecraft will be flying past Jupiter's moon Io (Images here) at an altitude of 124 miles. NASA is hoping that a recently discovered volcanic plume from the volcano Tvashtar will still be there during the flyby as Galileo is set to fly through the top quarter of the volcanic plume. Additional photo of Tvashtar here."

Comments

The plume is a incidental

[CheshireCatCO]

This is one of several press-releases I've seen which have come out of NASA about the upcoming pass of Io. I find it interesting that all of them trumpet the plume-pass so highly. Admittedly, it's a "gee-whiz" part of the mission, but there is probably no much science there. As Torrence said in the article, looking at how Tvashtar has changed and making a polar pass to get information of Io's magnetic field are far more interesting scientific goals. Io is the only Galilean moon for which we don't know of the field is intrinsic or induced -- during a polar pass in October of 1999, there was a glitch and the magnetometer was not brought back online in time to do the necessary measurements.