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New volcanoes, dramatic volcanic plumes, a recent impact from a possible comet and the tops of thunderhead clouds are the highlights in a scrapbook of images from the New Horizons spacecraft's recent swing past Jupiter.

The NASA probe's ultimate destinations are Pluto and a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. But the side trip to Jupiter gave New Horizons a boost in speed thanks to Jupiter's intense gravity, shaving three years off its travel time. The probe made its closest pass of Jupiter on 28 February.

In the best ever photos of Jupiter's faint ring system, the tiny moons Metis and Adrastea can be seen keeping the boulders and dust in the rings in line.

New Horizons also caught sight of the remains of what may have been a recent impact in the ring system. Three unexpected clumps of dust were spotted near the ring, although they are difficult to discern in this QuickTime movie.

"We've never seen structures like this in the rings before," says John Spencer, the Jupiter Encounter Science Team deputy leader at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US. "The rings have looked pretty uniform before, so to see these individual clusters of particles in the rings is a really new discovery."

Scientists suspect that a comet struck the charcoal-black rings sometime around January 2007, just weeks before New Horizons flew by and observed the dust clumps. By now, those clumps may be gone.
New volcanoes

Early on in its flyby, New Horizons spotted a huge plume of volcanic material spewing from the Tvashtar volcano on the moon Io. Hot lava glowing on the surface around Tvashtar may be from the same volcano as this plume, which stretches about 300 kilometres (200 miles) above the surface.

Scientists also found a relatively new volcano near Io's south pole that had not been seen by the Galileo spacecraft when it observed the region in 1999. The volcano is so new it does not yet have a name, but scientists suspect it is the source of a glowing gas plume spotted several hundred kilometres above the moon's surface.

And the spacecraft may have even witnessed the birth of a brand new volcano on Io. The evidence comes from a tiny orange oval thought to be the intense glow of hot, "young" lava, says Spencer.

Full story here
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See our TPODs Retrospective on Io, Io's "Volcanoes" Blur Scientific Vision and Electric Jets on Io

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