Arizona Telescope Captures Stunning Image of Jupiter's Io

TapTechNews on June 5, a mountain-top telescope in Arizona successfully captured a photo of Jupiter's active satellite Io, and the detail clarity can even be comparable to that of images taken by space probes.

According to TapTechNews, the new camera SHARK-VIS installed on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham in Arizona used in this research is able to distinguish features on Io's surface that are only 80 kilometers wide, a resolution that could previously only be achieved by spacecraft that explore Jupiter. The University of Arizona (the LBT management agency) said in a statement that this is equivalent to photographing an object the size of a dime from 161 kilometers away.

The details of the new images are so rich that scientists can identify the lava deposits ejected from two active volcanos located in the southern equatorial region of Io.

Ashley Davies, the lead scientist of Planetary Earth Sciences at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a co-author of this study, said in a statement that before the new camera was installed on the LBT last year, observing this kind of surface change event on Io from the Earth was impossible. This is because although infrared images from ground-based telescopes can detect hotspots that point to ongoing volcanic eruptions, their resolution is not high enough to identify the exact location of the eruption and surface changes such as fresh plume deposits.

SHARK-VIS was built by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics at the Italian Astronomical Observatory in Rome. Its unprecedented clarity is due to working in concert with the LBT's adaptive optics system, which continuously moves its double mirrors to compensate for the blurring caused by atmospheric disturbances. Then, an algorithm selects and combines the best images, resulting in the clearest Io image ever taken using a ground-based telescope.