Pulling together decades of data from the Voyager
, Galileo
, Cassini
, and New Horizon
probes, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope
, scientists at the US Geological Survey have put together a complete geological map of Io
, the beautiful, mysterious Jovian moon. Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system, and its surface reflects that: unlike everything else around, it has no craters, a sign that its surface is constantly being remade. That's thanks to volcanoes that shoot out more than 100 times more lava per year than Earth's
. The map is a lovely thing, and you can play around with it yourself here
.
