I'm here for two days to cover Juno, Cassini, Curiosity, and one Earth-as-a-planet session. I'm taking notes for longer posts that I'll get to later this week, but thought I would share a brief news item from yesterday: Juno has obtained some surprisingly good images of bright spots showing volcanism on Jupiter's moon Io, which are nicely complementary to work being done from Earth. I wanted to post about this because all the Io scientists I've found at AGU were completely unaware of these observations and didn't see the talk. So Io fans, a call to action: go find the JIRAM team today!

What's JIRAM? Most of you know about JunoCam's lovely images of Jupiter. JIRAM is a scientific imager on Juno. It doesn't take pictures in visible wavelengths, and it doesn't take them in high resolution. Instead, it's an infrared imaging spectrometer. It has far fewer pixels than JunoCam, but each pixel in a JIRAM image is a spectrum, a detailed measurement of how much energy is radiating from the target in wavelengths at which Jupiter -- and Io -- glow with heat.

Unfortunately, unlike JunoCam, whose images are all instantly public, JIRAM is a scientific instrument with the usual proprietary period, and the JIRAM team hasn't released many images. None of them are of Io. There actually is publicly released JIRAM data in NASA's Planetary Data System, and now I'm excited to dig into the data set. I pulled out one image at random, and it shows how JIRAM sees Jupiter: bright areas are Jupiter glowing with heat from within, and dark areas are high clouds blocking that radiation from view. At Io, JIRAM sees the difference between the dayside and the nightside, and it sees maybe two dozen active volcanoes glowing with heat.