The feature that ustrax circled is actually a cosmic ray hit; it's only present in the 20 msec exposure.

Thanks plasmatorus and...Welcome!

HERE BE DRAGONS…

Through your telescopes I am
Merely a star, a spark of light that slides
And glides ‘round proud Jupiter;
One night here, the next night there,
Sometimes with company, often alone
On Jove’s left or right. One of four
Fluttering fireflies flitting silently through
The blush of the Red Spot’s glow.

But dare to approach me, to brave Jupiter’s
Cell-scything rays and you’ll crave
The safety of Earth once more, for I am a world
Where chemistry screams at the sky
And tears at your eyes, with claws
Of colour so sharp and so raw
You’ll turn your face away and seek
The comfort of Callisto’s cratered smile.

For where my colder, older brother
And sister moons glow shivering shades of blue
And grey, my tortured face is painted hues
Of fiery red; instead of frigid plains
Of painfully pastel tones, my bones lie under
Seeping fields of sores and blistering boils.
A pox-infected moon am I, a leprous satellite
That brings my smooth-skinned family shame.

Yet, if they knew my secret, the mysteries
I keep hidden from their disapproving
View, they would feel envy, for the tangerine-
And clementine-hued splashes on my
Face are not mere volcanoes, as your
Earthly scientists believe, but are great blooms
And plumes of fyre, breathed out by beasts
Which bathe beneath my Jupiter-racked crust.

Maui, Marduk, Loki – dragons all, and with
Volund and Pele prowl and crawl thru my sulphurous
Churning seas; wings outstretched, tails sweeping
To and fro below my scabby-encrusted skin,
Swimming, spinning, gorging on my
Bitter bile before breaking through to spew
Their flaming breath out into space in great
Gushes of furious light. What a sight!

And what luck you had, sending one of your
Nuts and bolts butterflies gliding past me
Just as mighty Tvashtar roared, vomiting his
Dragonfyre towards the stars, howling with
Masubi and Prometheus in a choir of dragons
Singing to the Great One’s swirling storms;
What fortune to soar through this cloud of worlds
On your way to the Belt, and Beyond…

© Stuart Atkinson 2007

Nice poem! But...



Them's fighting words!

"nuts and bolts butterflies gliding past me"...

Brilliant as usual, O Laureate....thank you!

Click to view attachment
"Who you callin' pox-infected!?"


source photo: http://www.europa.astrowww.pl/en/ksiezyce.htm

If anyone is pox-infected, it's Callisto. Io is just a case of pizza-face (must be a teenager).

You mean that it is moved by strange internal stirrings which also causes it to break out in boils?

True, but not very, um, poetic is it, "pizza face"...

Then how about.... Scarface ™ ?

Well, the images are starting to trickle in. A few new Io shots at full disk and from farther out have just shown up on the LORRI raw site. Looks like we'll have to keep our eyes peeled in the coming weeks.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/index.php?page=1

Well spotted -- I had just visited the site seconds ago and didn't notice the new Io pics interleaved with the previously released ones. Those new four seem to be ISunMon1 and ISunMon2 (as described by Jason in his first post to this topic).


--Emily

Looks like ISunMon1 and ISunMon2 are down. Tvashtar plume visible in ISunMon2. Major surface changes visible at Acala Fluctus and southwest of Babbar Patera.

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Don't see Pele on the limb in the longer exposure image. The shorter exposure image reveals surface changes at Acala Fluctus and a dark halo around northeastern Lerna Regio (bottom right, southwest of Babbar Patera)

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You can see the Tvashtar plume in the longer exposure image at center. New eastbound lava flow from either Menakha Patera or Pautiwa Patera.

I've moved the LPSC related talk here:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=4019

Maybe I was a little hasty about the "flow" east of Menakha Patera and Pautiwa Patera. Turns out that dark feature was there 10 years ago. I think I was thrown off a bit by a brightening around Euboea Fluctus:

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachment

A cool new Io image is now posted on the New Horizons web page:
see here

John

That is truly spectacular!

Absolutely awesome image! Incandescent lava, plumes lit by jupitershine (!)... Can anything escape LORRI!?

That glowing lava really centers the source of the plume and brings out the 3D dome shape of the plume.

Wow... congratulations to you and all the team John, that's a tremendous image...

See? I told you there were dragons down there!

Can you imagine how big that "fire fountain" must be?
What a sight that would be from ground level!

Here's the famous Galileo image of the 1999 fire fountains, which were highly saturated. I think they were a couple of kilometers high. The white streaking below them is due to "bleeding" of the CCD.

John.

Click to view attachment

I don't think that's the fire fountain. I think that's the inner core of the Tvashtar plume ILLUMINATED by the fire fountain...

VERY nice image, John! As John just posted, the fire fountain from 1999 was only 1 km tall (I know, "only"), too short for NH to see. However, I thought the plume source is further west, in the westernmost Tvashtar patera.

Well, after a little work, I found the vent:

Click to view attachment

This of course assumes that the bright spot is a hotspot (similar to those seen by SSI on Galileo, though LORRI doesn't have the same wavelength response, only sensing up to 850 nm IIRC).

So what do we know about this area? Well, the source appears to be in the far left patera of Tvashtar Paterae. See http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03529 for a good image of this region. In particular, the glowing spot appears to be localized within the dolphin-shaped flow along the southern and eastern margin of this patera. A temperature map from the 2000/2001 eruption at this flow can be seen at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02594. Strangely enough, despite the energetic eruption that year, the morphology of the flow didn't change from before the eruption (see http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02584 if you don't believe me). It definitely would seem that eruptions at this lava flow produce quite a bit of pyroclastic material, producing a dark deposit in the immediate vicinity of the flow and a giant plume producing a red ring distally.

One should also not the apparent absence of the Pele plume...

Nice work Jason! You're ahead of us! Though I have trouble making that dark flow look like a dolphin...

Yup, no Pele plume. We didn't see one in the UV with HST, either.

Don't ask me how I got here...
Click to view attachment

Interesting.

Okay, maybe not dolphin...how about a whale?

Nice work, ustrax. Is it just me, or does it look like you can kinda see albedo features in the vicinity of the hot spot? when I look at animated gif I posted, it almost looks like you can see the dark spot marking the rest of the far western Tvashtar patera.

Thanks, yes, it looked to me also, I don't know if you were referring to the same I was thinking about, so I marked it and then justapose and adjusted one of the images you have provided, and it was a surprise to me...If the orientation of this is correct the hot spot is not where I was thinking about but a bit upper...Maybe I didn't understood you correctly...

Click to view attachment

No, the orientation should be different. It doesn't looks like we are seeing the same thing. Hot spot should be right about here:

Click to view attachment

More images are up. The first three listed look like the image just released by the NH team, but I think there are two new full disk shots as well (2007-02-24). This may be hard to keep track of soon as they keep coming in.

Even without processing, the Tvashtar plume is visible. Really great.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/index.php?page=1

More like this?
Click to view attachment
It looks like we can see some pixels matching with the easternmost feature (does it have a name?), seems like to have grown up...

Two more image sequences are down: ISunMon3 and Ihiresir4 (the 75-ms exposure image was released as a press release earlier, see the above posts).

The ISunMon3 image doesn't cover too much more additional terrain, with poorer resolution, than the first image returned and discussed on page 1 of this thread. So I won't cover this set, other than to say that the Tvashtar plume is visible and some surface changes are apparent at Zal, including an apparent plume ring that may confirm Zal as the location of the fainter of the three plumes seen in the recent press release image.

I've attached the shorter of the three exposures taken during Ihiresir4 and annotated some interesting features. In this image you can make features along a sliver of the trailing hemisphere. No obvious surface changes are apparent, but I direct your attention to the feature I label as "Reactivated flow". Now looking at Galileo images, an inactive flow is visible. But as we have seen at Thor and now Shango Patera, just because an old flow was there before doesn't mean there wasn't a surface change. The source of this flow is a small patera located at around 29 South, 232 West. This patera is surrounded by thin, digitate flows radiating out from the source. One of these flows runs to the northeast of this small patera, and at around 70 km from the vent, greatly expands, forming the flow I marked as "Reactivated flow". Now it does look like it darkened since the Galileo era, BUT given the high phase angle, I am reluctant to go completely with that conclusion. I think more low-phase images, hopefully coming soon will show whether this flow reactivated since Galileo.

Click to view attachment

I think this can help:
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Enlarged montage of two images (lor_0035015237_+lor_0035015240) with smoothing of dark regions and sharpening of illuminated side.

I love this moon!

Two new observations have showed up on the SOC page. I've posted crops of the shorter exposure image, magnified 2x. Don't really see any surface changes that jump out at me. The "Reactivated Flow" that I mentioned earlier today appears to be a phase angle effect, not an actual surface change.

The Pele ring continues to evolve. Pele kinda look like the way it did during the C21 non-targeted encounter in July 1999: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02501 . Pillan has just about faded back to its pre-eruption appearance.

Click to view attachment
ISunMon5 - 26.1 km/pixel - Clat=3.0 S, Clon=225.4 W - Altitude: 5,276,976 km

Click to view attachment
ISunMon6 - 25.8 km/pixel - Clat=3.0 S, Clon=253.1 W - Altitude: 5,217,587 km

Impressive images. In image lor_0035015234_0x630_sci_2 there are one or two bright pixels on the terminator near Rata Patera. Is that likely to be noise?

Those are quite likely to be noise hits. LORRI seems to be catching precious few hotspots save the one at Tvashtar.

BTW, john_s, no Io images in at least a week? Is everything okay?

Maybe they're just using the downlink to download other, more important data first.

Seriously, it's probably due to the immense size of LEISA datasets that no LORRI images got to be transmitted.

Volcanopele-- A couple of things conspired against new posts last week. The first was a spacecraft Go Safe event, which I've chronicled in a PI's Log which should be out Monday afternoon. The second is a
4-day weekend that our Science Ops Center boss has taken (he'll be back to the salt mines on Monday).

Not to worry, NH s fine. More images are coming, soon...

-Alan

Just you wait...

John.

Sweet. Good to hear everything is okay (now anyway).

John_s, good to hear you guys are catching more hotspots (either with LORRI and obviously with LEISA). The relative lack of hotspots has been one of the topics of discussion of us Iophiles on the outside looking in. I presume it has to do with the short exposures times and LORRI's weaker response in the near-IR (LORRI senses up to 850 nm compared to Galileo SSI's 1100 nm near-IR response limit).

WOOHOO!! New images are up!

EDIT: The "others" anyway... Nice to see Callisto and Ganymede, and the moon whose name shalt not be mentioned here.

Even at 7.9 Million Kilometers detail can be seen. http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/l...0x630_sci_2.jpg

Amazing.

VP has a simulated view on the first page.

Those images are discussed here: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&p=85822

The first images from MVIC have been released showing the Tvashtar hotspot and plume:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPho...ges/032807.html

This corresponds to the LORRI image released earlier this month. Here are a couple of composites using the 20-ms image and the press released 75-ms image:

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

I wonder if this is illumination from one or more of the other Galilean satellites. Below is an eclipse image from Galileo from the E11 orbit. In this image, you can make out albedo features on the surface. There is no sunlit areas in this view and only the left side should be illuminated by glow from Jupiter's atmosphere. The rest has to be illuminated from some where, I suspect Europa. I wonder if the same thing is going on here with Tvashtar, where there is another outside source of illumination.

Click to view attachment

EDIT: Yep, 'tis Europa:

Click to view attachment

I posted my version of that image here:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&p=87019

Very nice moonlit Galileo eclipse image- I thought I'd seen all the Galileo Io images but that one was new to me!

I suspect that around Tvashtar we're seeing the landscape illuminated by the plume itself, as we mentioned in the original caption.

John.