First image of the south pole of Jupiter's moon Io

April 18 () –

The JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this view of Jupiter's moon Io, “the first image of the south polar region of the moon.”

The picture was taken during the Juno spacecraft's 60th flyby of Jupiter on April 9, 2024. At the time the image was taken, Juno was about 16,500 kilometers above the surface of Io, NASA reports.

Similar to the rest of the moon's surface, Io's southern polar region is dotted with volcanic craters.

Io, Jupiter's third largest moon with a diameter of 3,600 kilometersis home to 400 active volcanoes and is the most geologically active object in the Solar System. It has the highest density of all satellites and, proportionally, the least amount of water of all known objects in the Solar System.

The Juno mission was launched in 2011 and arrived at Jupiter in 2016. It is designed to study the planet's atmosphere, its origin, structure and evolution within the Solar System. In addition, its orbit allows approaches to the main moons of the giant planet.

Citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos created the image by applying additional processing to an image created from raw JunoCam data by another citizen scientist, Gerald Eichstädt.