Keck AO Observations of Io in and out of Eclipse

Details Keck AO Observations of Io in and out of Eclipse Keck AO Observations of Io in and out of Eclipse

Apr 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003eaeja.....3136d&link_type=abstract

EGS - AGU - EUG Joint Assembly, Abstracts from the meeting held in Nice, France, 6 - 11 April 2003, abstract #3136

Physics

Optics

Scientific paper

Volcanically active Io remains a mysterious and intriguing moon, despite numerous spacecraft flybys. Galileo provided us with spectacular images and the realization that we understand little about the physical processes occurring on this moon. Groundbased monitoring programs help characterize the time evolution of Io's volcanic activity, such as the frequency, spatial distribution and temperature of hot spots and outbursts. Here we report Adaptive Optics observations of Io conducted with NIRC2 on Keck II on 18 December 2001 (UT), at 0.05" resolution (120-140 km on Io) in K', i.e., ~4 times better than HST NICMOS and global Galileo NIMS images. Our 1-5 micron data enable us to determine the temperature of individual hot spots, a key parameter for geophysical/volcanic flow models. We show: 1) Io in reflected sunlight in K', L', and M bands, using Io itself as reference source for the wavefront sensor. Our L and M-band images show both reflected sunlight and thermal emission from volcanic hot spots. The images are enhanced in contrast using the deconvolution code MISTRAL. 2) Io in eclipse. While Io is in Jupiter's shadow, it is invisible to the wavefront sensor, but its hot spots are easily visible in the near-infrared. We imaged Io during the 18 Dec. 2001 eclipse using Ganymede (30" from Io, moving relative to Io at ~0.5"/min) as a reference source. Numerous spots are detected at both K' and L', allowing temperature estimates for each of them. We used a variety of methods to deconvolve the images and determine photometric flux densities.

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