A Portrait of Planet and Moon: NASA's Juno Mission Captures Jupiter and Io Together

Just hours before NASA's Juno mission completed its 53rd close flyby of Jupiter on July 31, 2023, the spacecraft sped past the planet's volcanic moon Io and captured this dramatic view of both bodies in the same frame.

The surface of Io, the most volcanically active world in the solar system, is marked by hundreds of volcanoes that regularly erupt with molten lava and sulfurous gases. Juno has provided scientists with the closest looks at Io since 2007, and the spacecraft will gather additional images and data from its suite of scientific instruments during even closer passes in late 2023 and early 2024.

To create this image, citizen scientist Alain Mirón Velázquez processed a raw image from the JunoCam instrument, enhancing the contrast, color, and sharpness. At the time the raw image was taken on July 30, 2023, Juno was about 32,170 miles (about 51,770 kilometers) from Io, and about 245,000 miles (about 395,000 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops.

JunoCam's raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at https://missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing. More information about NASA citizen science can be found at https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience and https://www.nasa.gov/solve/opportunities/citizenscience.

More information about Juno is at https://www.nasa.gov/juno and https://missionjuno.swri.edu. For more about this finding and other science results, see https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/science-findings.