Volcanic moon’s gassy mystery solved

 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21308337/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/volcanic-moons-gassy-mystery-solved/

Scientists figure out how eons of eruptions contribute to Io’s atmosphere

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NASA / JHU-APL / SwRI

A composite image of Io, a moon of Jupiter, shows the Tvashtar volcano spewing gas high above Io's pockmarked surface.

By Dave Mosher

Space.com

updated 10/15/2007 1:51:00 PM ET 2007-10-15T17:51:00

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Jupiter's volcanic moon Io is veiled by a thin atmosphere, but how much its volcanoes and chunks of frozen gas contribute to its atmosphere has puzzled scientists for decades.

The New Horizons spacecraft recently documented the moon's glowing aurora, however, giving researchers a chance to solve the atmospheric mystery.
Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system. The moon's pockmarked and colorful appearance is not unlike a pepperoni pizza.
"Io is volcanically active, and that volcanism ultimately is the source material for Io's sulfur-dioxide atmosphere," said Kurt Retherford, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "But the relative contributions of volcanic plumes and sublimation of frosts deposited near the plumes have remained a question for almost 30 years."
Io's volcanoes spew out sulfur dioxide, which is a gas that stinks of freshly lit matches and almost entirely makes up the moon's atmosphere. As Io rotates from daylight into darkness, chilling the yellowish rock down to -226 degrees Fahrenheit (-143 degrees Celsius), the gas freezes into a solid, much like dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide).
"The atmosphere at that point collapses down so that all that is left supplying the atmosphere are the volcanoes," Retherford said.

NASA / JHU-APL / SwRI

These ultraviolet exposures of Io wer made by the New Horizon spacecraft's Alice ultraviolet spectrograph. The image shows four different exposures of the moon's nightside, where volcanic activity generated auroral activity at the equator.

Because Io's volcanic gas stays warm enough not to freeze and creates glowing auroras, scientists were able to find out how much the volcanoes supply Io's atmosphere by measuring the moon's nightside aurora.
About 1 to 3 percent of Io's dayside atmosphere, it turns out, is created by the volcanoes. The rest is generated from frozen sulfur dioxide that has accumulated on the surface over the course of eons and turns directly into gas when warmed.
New Horizons used its Alice ultraviolet spectrograph to capture images of Io's auroras on the spacecraft's way to Pluto, which mission scientists expect to reach in 2015. The latest findings from Retherford and his colleagues, based on the Alice data, are detailed in a recent issue of the journal Science.
© 2011 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

Image of the Day: Sicily's Mt. Etna erupts

Image of the Day: Sicily's Mt. Etna erupts

As the largest active volcano in Europe, Mt. Etna dominates the Sicilian landscape. Overnight this giant erupted, surprising the town of Catania only about 18 miles away.
Via Gizmodo

The Galileo space probe can just be seen against the cloud belts of Jupiter, as it flies by the highly volcanic moon Io. Several plumes erupt hundreds

 The Galileo space probe can just be seen against the cloud belts of Jupiter, as it flies by the highly volcanic moon Io. Several plumes erupt hundreds of kilometres into spacehttp://www.trinity.wa.edu.au/intranet/subjects/astronomy/My%20Webs/Yr%208%20Astro/Jupiter.htm

JUPITER 

MAGMA BUBBLES FROM MT. ETNA..SIMILAR TO IO'S ACTIVE SURFACE

Etna Volcano The Largest Active Volcano In Europe

Etna Volcano The Largest Active Volcano In Europe

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Alien Skies
By Wal Thornhill

NASA risks Galileo spacecraft byFLYING A "KITE" AT IO!

JPL News wrote: "Galileo makes two daring passes less than 620 km above Io on October 11 and November 25, 1999. In November Galileo might even pass through the plume of Pillan Patera, making it the first spacecraft ever to fly through an alien volcano."

NASA scientists are upholding a long tradition of misinterpreting observations from their space probes. This time they are jeopardising one of their most successful missions. Long ago in 1979, when the so-called volcanoes of Io were first discovered, Professor Thomas Gold of Cornell University wrote that they are actually the site of powerful electric discharges. NASA geologists paid no attention.

Jupiter is still capable of hurling a few thunderbolts!

"The biggest mystery about Io's volcanoes is why they're so hot," says Bill Smythe, a co-investigator on JPL's NIMS team. "At 1800 K, the vents are about 1/3 the temperature of the surface of the sun!"

The temperature measured by Galileo is an average based on the sharpest resolution of its instruments. If scientists are having difficulty explaining 1800 K, they are in for a shock when they get closer...

I predict that when seen close up the temperature of those hot spots will approach that of the Sun as they are both electric arcs. (Electric arcs create intensely hot spots.)

The plan to fly the Galileo spacecraft through the the plume of an Io volcano in November is therefore as foolhardy as flying a kite in an electrical storm. It is to be hoped that NASA will recognise the dangers in time to change their plan for November. That is, if Galileo survives the October flyby.

"Another thing we'll be going for with these close-up flybys are high resolution pictures of the lava flows", continued Smythe. "We really want to know what the shapes and edges of the flows look like because that can tell us a lot about the properties of the lava. On Earth lava flows form little side lobes, or extrusions that look like arms, feet and toes."

On the contrary, most of the dark patterns seen radiating from the crater in this image of the Marduk "volcano" are not lava flows. They have the shape of lightning scars on Earth and are caused by powerful currents streaking across the surface to satisfy the arc's hunger for electric charge. They rip huge sinuous furrows in the soil and hurl it to either side to form levee banks and side lobes. The stubby side channels will be found to have rounded ends like those seen on Martian "rivers".

Credit: Closeup of an Io Volcano - NASA, Voyager Project, Copyright Calvin J. Hamilton

Life Outside the “Habitable Zone”

The mystery of life, how it arises and how it survives in extreme conditions, may open new windows to the world of plasma and electricity.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050609tubeworms.htm

Pictured above left: Mussels, worms and spider crabs in a deep community of the Gulf of Mexico.
Right: Tubeworms in the Pacific Ocean (courtesy of NURP)
Credit: NURP

Human beings live on a planet where life thrives in every possible niche. Even at the frozen poles, life hangs on. We used to think that with too much or too little sunlight and without liquid water, life could not exist. Scientists developed the concept of a “habitable zone” around the sun—a range of orbits in which a planet would receive the right amount of energy from the sun to allow photosynthesis and to keep water liquid.

But then we discovered whole communities of organisms (images above) that thrive on the heat of underwater volcanoes. Bacteria synthesize chemicals in the hot water and live on the excess energy. Other life forms eat the bacteria. Tubeworms (image above) have no mouths or digestive systems. The chemosynthetic bacteria live inside the worms and transfer energy directly to the worms’ cells. The entire community exists without sunlight.

Still, as far as we can tell, life does require liquid water. Some organisms produce spores that can survive for centuries without water, but they need water to spring back to life. Others thrive in the near-boiling water of hot springs, but the water is still liquid. Nevertheless, the discovery of life that uses energy sources internal to the Earth undermines the concept of a habitable “zone”: Life could exist on a planet with a molten core or with tidal heating regardless of its distance from its sun.

The Electric Universe extends the possible locations for life even further. The behavior of plasma may provide another source of heat. Jupiter’s moons, for example, are awash in electrical activity. Scientists have already postulated that two of the moons, Europa and possibly Callisto, have liquid water oceans beneath their frozen surfaces because of tidal heating. The Galileo probe discovered “rains of electrons” falling onto these moons. Plasma cosmologists call such “rains” electric currents, and they know the currents must close in circuits. Those circuits must travel over or through the moons, and any resistance will convert some of the energy into heat. This raises the possibility that electricity could heat and melt subsurface water. The current coursing through Jupiter’s inner moon, Io, is even greater than that on Europa or Callisto, and it sports volcanoes that are hot and active. (See “Filamentation of Volcanic Plumes on the Jovian Satellite Io” here.) If water exists anywhere on Io, that may be another place to look for life.

Furthermore, the biological sciences have not considered the role plasma may play in the origin of life and its adaptation to sudden changes in environment. Just as astronomers are finding that plasma in space is important to cosmology, biologists may discover that it’s important to the origins and evolution of life as well.

Biological experiments that try to create life often make use of electrical discharge as well as chemical reactions. Were these experiments showing us that the electrical activity is a fundamental part of the life-forming process?

Catastrophic theory brings up another question. If plasma activity accompanied the catastrophic mass extinctions of Earth, then could this activity also stimulate surviving life to adapt to new conditions in a single generation? This would explain the puzzle that biologist Stephen Jay Gould noticed: The fossil record doesn’t show gradual changes in species. Instead, it shows new species appearing fully formed and then remaining unchanged for all of their existence. A plasma point of view would see this as a normal life function: the increased plasma activity of the catastrophic event would stimulate sudden and mutually responsive changes both in living forms and in their environment.

And what does this say about the habitable zone? Perhaps we should be looking for life in places where there has been strong plasma activity. In addition to moons that orbit close to their active gas giants, Wallace Thornhill points out that this would include planets that orbit inside the chromospheric glow discharge of dim red stars. In fact, conditions inside such a star might be ideal for life, unaffected by seasons or day/night cycles.

Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir chose the term “plasma” to describe the life-like behavior of electrified gases. That description works the other way around, too: Life has plasma-like behavior. Could this resemblance be more than analogy? Is plasma, like liquid water, an essential component of life? Do we need a new science of plasma biology?

Another Daring Adventure for Galileo

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast03aug_1/

Other stars, other worlds, other life?
 http://www.holoscience.com/views/view_other.htm
Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Dr. S. Ross Taylor has concluded after a lifetime's work on the formation of the solar system: "When the remote chances of developing a habitable planet are added to the chances of developing both high intelligence and a technically advanced civilization, the odds of finding 'little green men' elsewhere in the universe decline to zero." The bleak suggestion that we are freaks of chance and probably all the intelligence there is in this immense universe is intuitively unsatisfactory.
The problem with all predictions about intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is that it assumes we have defied history and reached a pinnacle of understanding at the close of the 20th century. History teaches that the peak we have climbed may be atop a house of cards. We might accept Dr. Taylor's conclusion based on the current model but it could be like pronouncing intelligent life to be highly unlikely in the ruins following the crash of a jumbo-jet. The solar system could be the result of a cosmic traffic accident. Possibly it is not the most hospitable environment for life. So using it as a benchmark must lead to pessimistic forecasts.
Let's examine a key assumption underlying such speculation - that we understand what constitutes a star. The first presumption appears in the following statement from the Encyclopedia Britannica: "The most basic property of stars is that their radiant energy must derive from internal sources. Given the great length of time that stars endure (some 10,000,000,000 years in the case of the Sun), it can be shown that neither chemical nor gravitational effects could possibly yield the required energies. Instead, the cause must be nuclear events wherein lighter nuclei are fused to create heavier nuclei..." Astrophysicists have never considered the simpler alternative - that stars are powered externally. All their genius has been directed at modelling how a giant ball of hydrogen could be coaxed into slowly releasing pent up atomic energy in the most difficult way imaginable - heating it to tens of millions of degrees. With one notable exception, no one has bothered to look for an alternative despite the fact that none of the observed features of the Sun have any business being there in the thermonuclear model.
The exception is the work of a remarkable engineer from Flagstaff Arizona, the late Ralph Juergens. In his model, stars simply form a positive electrode (anode) in a galactic glow discharge. The Sun and all stars are lit up by the electrical energy that shapes and flows along the arms of the galaxy. The Sun is a giant ball of lightning! This surprisingly simple model fits all of the observations about our Sun and forms one of the key ideas in the Electric Universe. A star's size, brightness and color are then largely determined by its electrical environment. That explains the puzzling lack of neutrinos expected from nuclear reactions in the Sun's core, and how some stars are able to vary their output far more quickly than the thermonuclear model allows.
Stellar lightning bolts are effective particle accelerators that can synthesize heavy elements in nuclear reactions at the surface of a star. The heavy elements seen in the Sun's spectrum are created at the surface of the Sun, along with the few neutrinos we observe. That neutrino numbers seem to follow surface and external effects like sunspots and the solar wind is to be expected in an electric star. It is inexplicable in the thermonuclear model.
In the last few years a new class of faint stars has been discovered. They are called L-Type Brown Dwarfs because the element lithium appears in their spectra. They are the most numerous stellar objects in the galaxy and bridge the gap between stars and Jupiter-sized planets. They are too small to be shining from internal thermonuclear power. A further puzzle is that they radiate blue and ultraviolet light even though they are cool at a temperature around 950K. Water molecules dominate their spectra.
All of these puzzles are simply explained by an electric star. There is no lower limit to the size of a body that can accept electric power from the galaxy so the temperatures of smaller dwarfs will range down to levels conducive to life. The light of a red star is due to the distended anode glow of an electrically low-stressed star. The blue and ultraviolet light come from a low-energy corona. (Our Sun's more compact red anode glow is seen briefly as the chromosphere during total solar eclipses. And the Sun is electrically stressed to the extent that bright anode "tufting" covers its surface with granulations and the corona emits higher energy ultraviolet light and x-rays as relativistic electrons strike it).
At the other extremity of size, Red Giants are a more visible and scaled-up example of what an L-type Brown Dwarf star might look like close-up. The Red Giant Betelgeuse is so huge that if it were to replace our Sun then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter would be engulfed by it. Astronomers recognize that such stars could swallow planets yet their plasma envelope is so tenuous that it would not impede the planetary orbits within the star's atmosphere. However, astronomers believe that any planet it swallowed would be gradually vaporized by intense heat from the star's core. But the standard stellar model has to be seriously fudged to explain Red Giants, their central temperature turns out to be so low that no known nuclear process can possibly supply the observed energy output. The electric model, on the other hand, works seamlessly from Supergiant star to a planet-sized Brown Dwarf.
Since an electric star is heated externally a planet need not be destroyed by orbiting beneath its anode glow. In fact life is not only possible inside the glow of a small brown dwarf, it seems far more likely than on a planet orbiting outside a star! This is because the radiant energy arriving on a planet orbiting inside a glowing sphere is evenly distributed over the entire surface of the planet.


There are no seasons, no tropics and no ice-caps. A planet does not have to rotate, its axis can point in any direction and its orbit can be eccentric. The radiant energy received by the planet will be strongest at the blue and red ends of the spectrum. Photosynthesis relies on red light. Sky light would be a pale purple (the classical "purple dawn of creation"). L-type Brown Dwarfs have water as a dominant molecule in their spectra, along with many other biologically important molecules and elements. Its "children" would accumulate atmospheres and water would mist down. It is therefore of particular interest that most of the extra-solar planets discovered are gas giants, several times the size of Jupiter, orbiting their star extremely closely. It is our system of distantly orbiting planets that seems the odd one out. In fact it argues in favor of a galactic traffic accident between the Sun and a sub-Brown Dwarf like Jupiter or Saturn.
So let's examine a second major plank of standard theory - that we understand where planets come from. The nebula theory of the origin of planets is so problematic that it only survives because no one has been able to come up with a better idea. A many-body system controlled by a single force, gravity, is inherently unstable and should fly to pieces. In an Electric Universe the model is simple. Planets are "born" from stars in a descending hierarchy of size by the highly efficient expedient of electrical splitting of an unstable positively charged core. That is why the majority of stars have partners. It explains why many of the extra-solar planets orbit their star extremely closely - that is where they were created. It is why Jupiter and Saturn have a large number of close-orbiting moons. Close orbits are normal. Distant or highly eccentric orbits are more likely to be a result of capture. An exchange between orbital and electrical energy quickly stabilizes orbits.
It can be seen that the Electric Universe model provides a superior environment for the establishment of life than a planet relying on a distant star and having to be self-sufficient for its atmosphere and surface deposits. Such a planet needs to rotate fairly quickly to even out the energy received and must have a small axial tilt for the same reason. It has only a limited range of orbits and eccentricity for life to survive. It also requires that the star maintains a steady radiance over millions of years. This is the Earth's present situation and I believe Prof. Taylor is right in considering the chances for life to have begun and to have survived here are close to zero.
If the following sounds like science fiction, so be it. Science fiction writers are far better than experts at predicting future knowledge. What then might be the Earth's history? The distant orbits from the Sun suggest that we were captured along with our Brown Dwarf parent. In the process, the electric power that drove our parent star was usurped by the Sun. As well as turning out the primordial light, the Sun stripped the Earth from its mother's womb along with the Moon. Night fell for the first time and stars appeared. Ice ages began suddenly. The polar caps formed. High latitudes became uninhabitable. It is worth adding that many of the moons, or remaining offspring, of the gas giants have surprisingly icy surfaces and some have atmospheres. Life may have existed once on Mars and some of those moons.
The Electric Universe model has almost biological overtones that favor life. In the process of growing in a galactic electromagnetic pinch, stars are prevented from becoming too massive by "budding off" other stars and gas giant planets. Some progeny remain to form binary or multiple star families. Others escape from their parent. All receive their share of energy from the galaxy. The most common stars in the galaxy are also the dimmest, the L-Type Brown Dwarfs. These stars have the "food" required for life present in their atmospheres. Such a dwarf star/gas giant may undergo a nova outburst to eject part of its core to form dense Earth-like planets and moons. If they remain close to the parent they may be enveloped within the "womb" of the stellar anode glow where it seems the principal conditions for life are present. Our search for intelligent life should therefore focus on the faintest close stars in the sky. But there is a problem in relying on radio signals because they cannot pass through the hot plasma of an anode glow. (That could account for the lack of success of SETI so far). It would limit the ability of intelligent creatures living in that environment to know anything about the wider universe since they would not see stars. There would be no incentive for space travel which, in any case, might be a problem through the anode glow region. Maybe we on Earth are almost a "one off", as Dr. Taylor says, to have survived an escape from our stellar cocoon to see the wider universe. If so, I hope we learn to use our privileged position wisely.
The most disturbing idea I have left to last: the words used by ancient civilizations that are interpreted today as "the Sun" - like the Egyptian "Ra", the Greek "Helios", and the Roman "Sol" - all originally referred to the gas giant Saturn! Was that planet our primordial parent? Was Saturn until recently a much larger brown dwarf? (The apparent size and color of an electric star is an electrical phenomenon. If Jupiter's magnetosphere were lit up it would appear the size of the full Moon). Was ancient man around to see it as a sun? If not, why would anyone call a faint yellowish speck in the night sky - the Sun? Just how recently did Saturn get its icy ring? Does the discovery that the human race seems to have spread from a handful of survivors in the not so distant past have anything to do with this story? Oddly enough, an interdisciplinary approach can answer many of these questions in surprising detail. But it requires letting go of a lot of "things we know ain't so".
The present model of isolated self-powered stars with a family of relatively distant planets gives infinitesimally small windows of opportunity for life to gain a foothold, let alone sustain it for millions of years. An Electric Universe where energy is available to objects throughout the entire volume of a galaxy is an infinitely better environment for life. Faint, dwarf electric stars may be crucial to a radical reassessment of the likelihood of other intelligent life in the universe. Who knows, the Cassini mission to Saturn may be a kind of homecoming? It will return some surprises.

"Meanwhile, following the ages-old tradition of commemorating the Earth's lucky escape from doom in a cosmic accident and its first new year in the solar system - I wish you all a HAPPY SATURNALIA!"

Image Credit: Dr. S. Ross Taylor - Photo by Darren Boyd.

High tide on Io!

http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/io-tides/redirected/
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High tide on Io!

Jupiter's moon Io looks like a giant pizza. This poor moon suffers from huge "Io-quakes" and violent volcanoes.

On planet Jupiter's moon Io ("EYE-oh"), the ground itself moves up and down like an elevator taking people to the top and bottom of a 30-story building!
On Earth, we have ocean tides because the moon's gravity pulls a little harder on the side closer to the moon than the side farther from the moon. On Io, the gravity of Jupiter and Jupiter's other large moons yank on Io every which way. Although there are no oceans on Io, its "solid ground" tides are more than five times as high as the highest ocean tides on Earth!
Actually, Earth has solid ground tides too, but they amount to less than 20 centimeters (about 8 inches).

Here, the gravity of Jupiter and large moon Ganymede (with help from moons Europa and Callisto) play tug-o'-war, with Io playing the part of the rope! Io bulges on two sides like a football.

At this time, Jupiter and all three of the other large moons pull on the same side of Io. Its orbit bends to pull it closer to Jupiter. Io is again squished like a football.

All this bending causes heat to build up inside Io. Io gets so hot inside that some of the material inside melts and boils and tries to escape any way it can. So it blows holes in the surface! That's what volcanoes are. Some on Io have shot their hot gas plume 300 kilometers (about 200 miles) into space!

The Galileo spacecraft took this picture of Io during its closest flyby in October 1999. Galileo was only about 600 kilometers (400 miles) from Io's surface.

NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which orbited and studied the Jupiter system from 1995 to 2003, flew closer to Io than any other spacecraft. It revealed gigantic lava flows and lava lakes, and towering, collapsing mountains.

Galileo survives volcanic flyby

Space Science News home

Galileo survives volcanic flyby

NASA spacecraft completes the first of two historic flybys of Jupiter's moon Io

BASED ON A NASA/JPL PRESS RELEASE

October 11, 1999: NASA's Galileo spacecraft has successfully zipped past Jupiter's moon Io, the most volcanic body in our solar system.

Instruments onboard the spacecraft peered down at Io from an altitude of only 611 kilometers (380 miles) at 10:06 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Sunday. This was the closest look at Io by any spacecraft, and Galileo's cameras were poised to capture the brief encounter.

Right: Artist's concept of Galileo swooping over the surface of Io. [click for animation].

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If all goes as planned, the data will be transmitted to Earth over the next several weeks and then will undergo processing by mission scientists. New pictures would then be released at a press briefing tentatively scheduled next month.

"We're thrilled that the spacecraft handled this flyby so well, particularly because it had to endure a strong dose of radiation from Jupiter," said Jim Erickson, Galileo project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "It appears at this point that everything went well."

Because Io is the innermost of Jupiter's moons, it lies in a region with the highest levels of radiation from Jupiter, which can wreak havoc with spacecraft instruments.

Recent Headlines December 3: Mars Polar Lander nears touchdown December 2: What next, Leonids? November 30: Polar Lander Mission Overview November 30: Learning how to make a clean sweep in space

During this Io flyby, it appears the radiation did trigger an error of the onboard computer's memory, which put the spacecraft in a "safe mode," halting all non-essential activities while awaiting further commands from the ground. That occurred Sunday morning at 3:09 a.m Pacific time. Galileo engineers scrambled to prepare new commands to help the spacecraft work around the problem. The commands were transmitted to the spacecraft late Sunday afternoon, they worked as hoped, and Galileo resumed full operations at 8 p.m. Pacific time, just two hours before the Io flyby.

Visit IoFlyBy.com for coverage of Galileo's close encounters with Io, including science news and the latest images of Jupiter's volcanic moon.

"It was a heroic effort to pull this off, "Erickson said. "The team diagnosed and corrected a problem we'd never come across before, and they put things back on track."

"We look forward to seeing the closest-ever pictures of Io," said Dr. Duane Bindschadler, Galileo manager of science operations and planning. "We want to learn more about the differences and similarities between volcanoes on Io and volcanoes on Earth." During the flyby, Galileo's science instruments studied the surface chemistry, heat, gravity and magnetic properties of Io.

The flyby took place while Galileo was 598 million kilometers (372 million miles) from Earth. A second, closer flyby of Io by Galileo is planned for the evening of November 25 Pacific time (November 26 Eastern time) at an altitude of 300 kilometers (186 miles).

Parents and Educators: Please visit Thursday's Classroom for lesson plans and activities related to this story.

Additional information about the Galileo mission is available on the Galileo home page at a new web address of http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov.

JPL manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.

Deep Impact—The Smoking Guns?
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050708smoking.htm
Several years ago, Wallace Thornhill accurately predicted what Galileo investigators would find when they looked at the “volcanoes” on Jupiter’s closest moon Io. He said that the plumes would not be “volcanoes” but discharges moving around the edges of the excavated areas, exactly as NASA discovered on Io, and as now appears to be occurring on Tempel 1. He said the plumes would be much hotter than NASA officials expected (in fact they produced the same kind of whiteouts now seen on Tempel 1). And he said that the supposed “lava lakes” on Io would be cold (they are simply the excavated terrain beneath the surface, exposed by the etching process.) Now it is becoming more clear every day that Thornhill’s successful predictions for Io, make what is happening on Tempel 1 all the more significant. In the above pictures we see that the dominant positions of the white spots are on the rims of craters and the cliffs rising above valley floors. A particularly telling example of this relationship is seen in the picture here
In fact the active areas in the upper picture above reveal uncanny similarities to the discharge activity on Io as observed in previous Pictures of the Day. One of the features of electric arc erosion noted by Thornhill many years ago, is the tendency to create scalloped edges as it cuts away material from the cliffs edges it is acting on. This tendency we see abundantly on Io, which makes an observation in a NASA release on Deep Impact all the more noteworthy: "The image [of the nucleus] reveals topographic features, including ridges, scalloped edges and possibly impact craters formed long ago”. (The phrase “long ago” has no scientific basis; it is merely the projection of an unfounded assumption; continual ablation of cometary ices by solar heating of the surface would not permit the preservation of such abundant, sharply defined craters for long periods of time).
On Io, the darkest surfaces are associated with recent arcing along the edges of craters and cliffs, exposing the underlying rock. Electrostatic fallback of ejecta covers the flat areas with lighter material.

Io
Hot plumes Thornhill: I predict that when seen close up the temperature of those hot spots will approach that of the Sun as they are both electric arcs. (Electric arcs create intensely hot spots.) see [ 1999 Oct 8]	Result The spacecraft measured the temperatures of Io's "volcanic" hot spots and gave readings, averaged over a pixel, that were hotter than any lava on Earth - in fact, too hot to be measured by Galileo's instruments. see [ 2004 Dec 15]
Channel shapes Thornhill: On the contrary, most of the dark patterns seen radiating from the crater in this image of the Marduk "volcano" are not lava flows. They have the shape of lightning scars on Earth and are caused by powerful currents streaking across the surface to satisfy the arc's hunger for electric charge. They rip huge sinuous furrows in the soil and hurl it to either side to form levee banks and side lobes. The stubby side channels will be found to have rounded ends like those seen on Martian "rivers". see [ 1999 Oct 8]	Result The best resource for this is the closeups of Io's "volcanoes" that show the stubby, round-ended channels. One of the clearest is PIA02545 where you see the scalloped channels off to the right of the so-called "caldera." see [ 2000 May 18]
Moving plumes The plumes are the jets of cathode arcs, and they do not explode from a volcanic vent but move around and erode the periphery of dark areas (called "lava lakes" by planetary geologists) see [ 2004 Dec 15]	Result None of the expected volcanic vents could be found. Rather, the plumes of the "volcanoes" are actually moving across the surface of Io, an exclamation point being provided by the plume of Prometheus which, in the years since Voyager, has moved more than 80 kilometers. see [ 2004 Dec 15]
Cool "lava lakes" Thornhill: The "lava lakes" themselves are merely the solid surface of Io etched electrically by cathode arcs and exposed from beneath the sulfur dioxide "snow" deposited by continuous discharge activity. Therefore, they will not reveal the expected heat of a recent lava flow. see [ 2004 Dec 15]

http://www.thunderbolts.info/predictions.htm#io

Dynamic Plumes and Solid Wall Interactions: Transient Levitation of Falling Bodies

http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/plume-dynamics-tf/

Animation:

http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2001/08/02/ast16oct_1_resources/Io_volcano.mov

As an extreme example in which the injected quantity cannot mix with the ambient fluid, consider recently obtained experimental results concerning the motion of falling bodies through stratified fluids (similar to

Figure 2. Vertical buoyant jets through a strong stable density step: Left is oil (0.8 g/cm3), right is alcohol-water mixture (0.8 g/cm3). (Thanks to former UNC undergraduates Ryan McCabe and Daniel Healion for assistance with the experiment.)

the tank setup in Figure 2) (Abaid, Adalsteinsson, Agyapong, McLaughlin, 2004). This study has focused upon the effect of self-generated plumes upon the falling body and has documented situations in which a falling body may generate a dynamic plume that through hydrodynamic coupling, may temporarily arrest the body. Of course, any body moving through a fluid experiences a hydrodynamic drag (which sets terminal velocities of falling bodies) in which the viscous boundary condition of vanishing fluid flow at the solid boundary necessarily drags a blob of ambient fluid along the moving body. In a constant density fluid, there is no potential energy cost associated with moving such a parcel of ambient fluid vertically. However, in strongly stratified fluids, a parcel of fluid moved from one altitude to another may develop a potential energy (buoyancy), as when the body falls through a sharp density transition layer. The momentum of the attached blob of fluid thrusts it into the lower (heavier) fluid, at which point the blob becomes a density anomaly and rises sharply. This motion in turn drags the falling body along with it.

Figure 3 shows three montages of a descending sphere at uniformly spaced times. The (5 mm radius) sphere in this case has a density of 1.04 g/cm³ and is falling in a stratified tank whose top is fresh water (0.997 g/cm³) and whose bottom is salt water (1.039 g/cm³), again with a transition thickness of approximately 1 in. The top montage demonstrates the arrest and transient rise of the initially falling bead, and subsequent return to slow descent, each image uniformly spaced 1.5 s apart. The bead ultimately comes to rest at the tank bottom. The middle montage is the same as the top, only uniformly spaced at 0.1 s intervals. The lower montage has the same time sequence as the middle row, only focusing upon the shadow on the back of the tank, which highlights the entrained, plume-forming fluid.
The nature of this phenomenon is both nonlinear and dynamic. The nonlinear effect of such plumes upon

Figure 3. Top: Digital snapshots of bead position on uniform 1.5 s intervals, Middle: uniformly spaced on 0.1 s intervals, Bottom: shadowgraph depicting the dynamic plume on same time interval as middle row (Abaid, Adalsteinsson, Agyapong, McLaughlin, 2004). (Thanks to David Adalsteinsson for help with formatting the collage in his DataTank program and thanks to former UNC undergraduate Nicole Abaid for assistance with the experimental effort.)

the motion of solid bodies has been incorporated in a reduced system of ordinary differential equations in which the drag law for the falling body is modified to account for the dynamics of the plume which may modify the relative velocity of the falling sphere (Abaid, Adalsteinsson, Agyapong, McLaughlin, 2004). To describe the detailed dynamics of such transient plumes is quite difficult. Historically, there has been more success in the modeling of plume geometries under steady-state geometries. In pioneering work, Morton, Turner, and Taylor (Morton et al., 1956; Morton, 1967; Turner, 1995) were the first to model maintained plumes using an entrainment hypothesis which has become a standard in many fields (Fisher et al., 1979; Sparks et al., 1997).