The Mysterious Inner Workings of Io, Jupiter’s Volcanic Moon
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Scott Bolton’s first encounter with Io took place in the summer of 1980, right after he graduated from college and started a job at NASA. The Voyager 1 spacecraft had flown past this moon of Jupiter, catching the first glimpse of active volcanism on a world other than Earth. Umbrella-shaped outbursts of magmatic matter rocketed into space from all over Io’s surface. “They looked amazingly beautiful,” said Bolton, who is now based a