Ian mentioned to take a look at the Volcano eruption on Io as captured by the LORRI imager on New Horizons. Take a look indeed! This is almost beyond cool.
You are looking at the plume from the volcano Tvshtar near the north pole of Io. The plume is 290 km (180 miles) high. While Voyager saw a plume on the volcano Pele, this plume was sighted two weeks ago by Hubble and this fantastic image again was taken by New Horizons.
There are two more plumes visible, the one on the left at about 9 o’clock, is from the volcano Prometheus and is 60 km (40 miles) high; and one in the lower center on the face of the moon, from volcano Masubi.
Also according to the press release, the mountains by the terminator (the boundary between light and dark) are Mt. Everest sized.
Simply amazing.
There was another picture of Tvashtar when Galileo flew near Io in 2001. A Science@NASA release speculated the volcano might be active; I guess this answers the question.
Image NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Amazing indeed!
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