Io Plume Monitoring (frames 1-36)
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First Subset of Images (Frames 1-9)
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Second Subset of Images (Frames 10-15)
Animated GIF (48K) -- Quicktime Animation (18K) -- MPEG Animation (18K)
Third Subset of Images (Frames 16-21)
Animated GIF (45K) -- Quicktime Animation (14K) -- MPEG Animation (19K)
Fourth Subset of Images (Frames 22-27)
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Quicktime Animation (17K) --
MPEG Animation (17K)
Fifth Subset of Images (Frames 28-36)
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Quicktime Animation (37K) --
MPEG Animation (137K)
NOTE: These animations is made available in order to share with the public the excitement of new discoveries being made via the NASA/JPL Galileo spacecraft. Galileo scientists are in the process of calibrating and validating this data. The full digital images necessary for scientific analysis will be released within one year of receipt of this orbit's last data.
This image is available only on the WWW; it is not available in hardcopy or other forms.
A sequence of full disk Io images was taken prior to Galileo's second encounter with Ganymede. The purpose of these observations was to view all longitudes of Io and search for active volcanic plumes. The images were taken at intervals of approximately one hour corresponding to Io longitude increments of about ten degrees. Because both the spacecraft and Io were traveling around Jupiter the lighting conditions on Io (e.g. the phase of Io) changed dramatically during the sequence. These images were registered at a common scale and processed to produce a time-lapse 'movie' of Io. This movie combines all of the plume monitoring frames obtained by the Solid State Imaging system aboard NASA's Galileo spacecraft.
The most prominent volcanic plume seen in this movie is Prometheus (latitude 1.6 south, longitude 153 west). The plume becomes visible as it moves into daylight, crosses the center of the disk, and is seen in profile against the dark of space at the edge of Io. This plume was first seen by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979 and is believed to be a geyser-like eruption of sulfur dioxide snow and gas. Although details of the region around Prometheus have changed in the seventeen years since Voyager's visit, the shape and height of the plume have not changed significantly. It is possible that this geyser has been erupting nearly continuously over this time. Galileo's primary 24 month mission includes eleven orbits around Jupiter and will provide observations of Jupiter, its moons and its magnetosphere.
North is to the top of all frames. The smallest features which can be discerned range from 13 to 31 kilometers across. The images were obtained between the 2nd and the 6th of September, 1996.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington , DC.
This image and other images and data received from Galileo are posted on the World Wide Web, on the Galileo mission home page at URL http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo. Background information and educational context for the images can be found at URL http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sepo
This work was sponsored by NASA's Office of Space Science Solar System Exploration Program and Information Systems Office and was produced for the Project Galileo and the Solar System Visualization Project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Multimission Image Processing Laboratory & Digital Image Animation Laboratory
Image Processing & Animation by Jan R. Yoshimizu, Douglas A. Alexander, Amy H. Culver, Myche Mc Auley, Shigeru Suzuki,
Directed by Alfred McEwen, Eric M. De Jong
Science & Technical Support by Michael J.S. Belton, Torrence V. Johnson, Kenneth P. Klaasen, Carol L. Stanley, Solid State Imaging Team, Science Data Team and the women and men of Project Galileo
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