U.S. astronomer Andy Cheng, from the Applied Physics Laboratory at The Johns Hopkins University (JHU), made this dramatic comment (“Omigod! I can’t believe it”) after seeing the photograph for the first time.

Take a look at this photograph that appears at NASA’s Web site (Science-at-NASA) titled “Alien Volcano” and at JHU’s Web site (New Horizons: NASA’s Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission) titled “Mission Photos”.

Io is the innermost of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons—the four largest moons of the planet. It orbits Jupiter at a radius of about 421,700 kilometers (262,000 miles).

The volcano Tvashtar (formally, Tvashtar Paterae) is a region of volcanic activity on Io. It is located near its northern pole. The volcano is named after Tvashtar, the Hindu god of blacksmiths.

When seen by New Horizons, Tvashtar was erupting with a plume that was about 290 kilometers (180 miles) in height above Io’s surface. Astronomers are still unclear as to the explanation for the filamentary structure of the plume.

New Horizons saw the plume through the use of its onboard LORRI telescope. LORRI stands for LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager. The telescope takes high-resolution visible-light photographs with a charge coupled-device (CCD) imager that contains an 8.2-inch aperture.

On January 19, 2006, the NASA New Horizons spacecraft was launched by an Atlas V-551 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, for its mission to the planet Pluto and its moon Charon. The official name of the mission “Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission” will be the first reconnaissance of the distant Pluto-Charon system. The spacecraft, built by the Southwest Research Institute (Texas) and JHU Appliced Physics Laboratory (Maryland), is expected to fly within 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometers) of Pluto and as close as 6,800 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Charon. Its encounter with Pluto should occur around July 2015.

Additional information about NASA’s New Horizons (Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission) can be found on Web site: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/.

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