Observations of Io's Active Volcanoes from IRTF: Imaging and Occultation Lightcurves

We have been observing Ionian volcanism from NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) for more than two decades. The frequency of our observations increases dramatically when spacecraft are observing Io in order to complement the data returned by the spacecraft. The Japanese Space Agency’s (JAXA) Hisaki (Sprint-A) mission recently observd the Jupiter system from earth orbit, monitoring the Io Plasma Torus and Jovian aurora. In order to investigate the possible influence of Io volcanism on the torus, we observed Io’s volcanoes from the IRTF in Hawaii between September 2013 and May 2014. We imaged Io at 2.2, 3.5, and 4.8 microns in eclipse and reflected sunlight. We also observed Io during occultation by Jupiter, which allows us to locate and characterize individual volcanic eruptions, with greater spatial accuracy, on the Jupiter-facing hemisphere.

The 2013 3.5 micron images of a sunlit Io showed no obvious bright volcanic features. However, further increases in spatial resolution is possible with shift-and-add processing of short exposure images. Preliminary occultation lightcurves from 2013 show moderate levels of activity at Kaneheliki/Janus and Loki, the two volcanic centers most often observed in occultation lightcurves. Loki was much brighter in 2013 than during the New Horizons flyby in 2007, but not as bright as during the Galileo era (see figure).

From February 2014 through May 2014, due to a planned upgrade on the SPEX instrument and an unplanned required repair on the NSFCam2 instrument (both of which we have used previously), we exclusively used the CSHELL instrument as an imager. Unfortunately, CSHELL was not designed for imaging and has limited spatial resolution and photometric precision, complicating image analysis.