Here's Why Jupiter's Volcanic Moon Io has 'Meandering Ridges' Like Deserts Here on Earth universetoday storybywill
This annotated image highlights the location of the new heat source in the southern hemisphere of the Jupiter moon Io. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM, which orbited Jupiter between 1995 to 2003 and logged so many scientific firsts that researchers are still analyzing the data it sent back. While the Galileo probe was the first mission primarily dedicated to studying Jupiter’s atmosphere and magnetosphere , it made several passes by all of its largest moons.
Researchers also identified curious features on the surface that they described as “dune-like” but concluded they weren’t dunes since Io has such weak winds . According to our current scientific understanding, dunes are hills or ridges of sand that form strong winds.
Once they had devised a mechanism for explaining how dunes could form on Io’s surface, the research team compared their results to photos of Io’s surface taken by thespacecraft. In the end, they found that the spacing of the dunes’ crests and their height-to-width ratios were consistent with what has been seen with dunes on Earth and other planets and satellites .
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