Juno showed a close-up of a placer of volcanoes on Jupiter's moon

Hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Earth is a world teeming with lava - this is Jupiter's satellite called Io. And the Juno spacecraft managed take a close-up photo of it.

The interplanetary station has been circling around the gas giant for 9 years, studying, among other things, its many moons. The object of her latest study was Io - the most volcanic place in the solar system. Juno passed by at the closest possible distance - only 22,000 kilometers. For comparison: the Moon is about 400,000 kilometers from the Earth.

Bright pictures were taken on July 30th. They were processed to better display the colors and processes in the satellite's atmosphere. It is noted that these are some of the most detailed images of Io in history.

Most of the dark spots in the photo are giant lava fields. They are constantly changing and growing.

probe also fixed plasma waves in Jupiter's atmosphere. They are known as Kelvin-Helmholtz (KHI) instabilities and result from the interaction of the solar wind plasma with the outer level of the planet's magnetic field. The difference in their speed creates a whirlwind.