Dr. Rosaly Lopes is on the team for one of the Galileo instruments that has
returned information about active volcanoes, the near-infrared mapping
spectrometer, or NIMS.

Scientists using NASA’s Galileo spacecraft have made many discoveries about
the volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io since Galileo began orbiting Jupiter in
1995. The spacecraft’s final three encounters with Io are in August and
October, 2001, and January 2002.

Dr. Rosaly Lopes, a volcanologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is on
the science team for one of the Galileo instruments that has returned
information about active volcanoes, the near-infrared mapping spectrometer,
or NIMS. She is a native of Brazil who earned her doctorate from the
University of London. In September 1979, she was doing field research at Mt.
Etna, on the Italian island of Sicily, when a crater only about a mile away
from her exploded and killed several people. “I really learned to respect
volcanoes,” Lopes said.

Q: How did you get interested in studying volcanoes on Io?

A: I studied volcanoes on Earth and Mars for my Ph.D. I had just started in
1979, the year Voyager discovered volcanoes on Io, so that was a great
excitement. My opportunity to study volcanoes on Io came with Galileo, when
I started planning the Io observations for NIMS.

Q: How volcanic is Io?

A: We consider Io the most volcanic body in the solar system because its
volcanoes put out the most heat. We have found more than 100 volcanoes on
Io, but Earth has more than 600 active volcanoes, so it’s not the number
that make Io the most volcanic. It’s the heat output. Io is only about
one-third as big as Earth, but it puts out about twice the energy. One of
Io’s volcanoes, Loki, is more powerful than all of Earth’s volcanoes
combined.

Q: Are Io’s volcanoes like Earth’s volcanoes?

A: Yes and no. The types of eruptions we have observed on Io are similar to
types of eruptions on Earth — lava flows, calderas, fire fountains like in
Hawaii — but there are some very different aspects. One is that lava on Io
is much hotter than any lava that flows on Earth today. Billions of years
ago Earth had lava that hot. Another difference is that the calderas, the
volcanic craters, on Io are much larger than on Earth. Lava flows are much
larger, too. [An Io volcano named] Amirani has a lava flow 300 kilometers
[190 miles] long, and that’s much longer than any on Earth. Globally, Io
erupts more than 100 times as much lava per year as Earth, including Earth’s
undersea eruptions.

Q: Where could you go on Earth that might look like Io?

A: The big island of Hawaii has the Kilauea volcano that has been active for
about two decades. Yellowstone is a large caldera that has many areas with
brightly colored sulfur. Stromboli [in Italy] has been active for at least
2,000 years. Some very old lava flows on Earth, such as some in South
Africa, are a composition called komatiite, which we think is the
composition of Io’s lavas. Probably the most similar place on Earth just in
terms of the great amount of volcanic activity is under the ocean at the
mid-ocean ridge.

Q: What makes Io so volcanic?

A: Although both Earth and Io have active volcanism, the way the volcanism
happens is quite different. On Earth, volcanism is tied to plate tectonics,
and we don’t believe Io has plate tectonics. Io is in a tug of war between
Jupiter and Europa and Ganymede, two of the other large moons of Jupiter,
and that is what heats it up. If Io weren’t in its very peculiar orbit
around Jupiter, it wouldn’t have active volcanism. It would have cooled off
a long time ago.

Q: Some people say Io looks like a pizza. What are all those bright colors?

A: We think the bright colors are due to sulfur in various forms but that
the very dark colors are due to active lavas. Every place we see high
temperatures, if we look at the surface we see dark materials. That would be
the olives on the pizza. The reds are deposits from the plumes of volcanoes.
With time, the reds become yellow because of changing to a different form of
sulfur. We’re still quite puzzled by what some of the very small green areas
are. We joke and call them golf courses. They may be areas rich in sulfur
but contaminated by another material. Another possibility is they are very
olivine- rich lava. Olivine is a green mineral.

Q: What is there about Io that is still a mystery to you?

A: We still don’t know if Io has its own magnetic field, like the Earth
does. That would help us understand the interior. We hope we will still get
an answer from Galileo about that. There are other questions that will still
remain after Galileo. What is the composition of the lavas? We are using
their temperature to say what is the most likely composition based on
comparison with lavas on Earth, but we don’t really know whether lavas on Io
are something entirely different. We won’t know that until we can go back
with more refined instruments or maybe someday go there and bring back some
samples. When we study volcanoes on Earth, one of the first things we do is
collect samples of lava and take them back to the lab, but for Io, that’s a
long way in the future.