CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Tvashtar Montage

Tvashtar Montage
PIA 10101

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 The Tvashtar plume on Io, seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and by New Horizons.

(A): The image in which the plume was discovered, taken by HST in ultraviolet light on Feb. 14, 2007, at a wavelength of 260 nm. The red diamond indicates location of the Tvashtar hot spot seen later by New Horizons. (B): An HST image of Io and the Tvashtar plume seen against Jupiter; sulfur gas in the plume absorbs ultraviolet light, making the plume look reddish in this color composite. The composite is composed of images taken at 260 nm (blue), 330 nm (green), and 410 nm (red). Other images in this montage are in visible light from the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). The scale bar is 200 kilometers long and the yellow star indicates the projected location of the hot spot at the Tvashtar plume source. The dashed line is the terminator, the line dividing day from night on Io. (C): The highest-resolution view of the full plume, at a resolution of 12.4 kilometers (7.7 miles) per pixel and a solar phase angle of 102 degrees, showing the complex filamentary structure of the plume. The images are sharpened by un-sharp masking; the dark line at the edge of the disk is an artifact of this sharpening. (D): An image at 145-degree phase angle at 22.4 kilometers (13.8 miles) per pixel, showing the time variability of the details of the plume structure and its persistent bright top. (F-J): Sequence of frames at 2-minute intervals showing dynamics in the upper part of the plume (the source is on the far side of Io). Colored diamonds track individual features whose speeds, projected on the plane of the sky, are shown in (E).

This image appears in the Oct. 12, 2007, issue of Science magazine, in a paper by John Spencer, et al.


Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute