Space.com contributing writer Stefanie Waldek is a self-taught space nerd and aviation geek who is passionate about all things spaceflight and astronomy.
NASA's Juno mission might have originally been all about Jupiter, but its extended mission has the spacecraft observing the gas giant's moons — and it's making some pretty interesting discoveries. Its latest find? The Jovian moon Io is covered in"fire-breathing" lava lakes.
"We now have an idea of what is the most frequent type of volcanism on Io: enormous lakes of lava where magma goes up and down," Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, said in a statement."The lava crust is forced to break against the walls of the lake, forming the typical lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes."
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