NASA Juno Mission Spots Most Powerful Volcanic Activity on Io to Date - UNIVERSE

A massive hotspot — larger the Earth’s Lake Superior — can be seen just to the right of Io’s south pole in this annotated image taken by the JIRAM infrared imager aboard NASA’s Juno on Dec. 27, 2024, during the spacecraft’s flyby of the Jovian moon.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM

Even by the standards of Io, the most volcanic celestial body in the solar system, recent events observed on the Jovian moon are extreme.

Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission have discovered a volcanic hot spot in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter’s moon Io. The hot spot is not only larger than Earth’s Lake Superior, but it also belches out eruptions six times the total energy of all the world’s power plants. The discovery of this massive feature comes courtesy of Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, contributed by the Italian Space Agency.

“Juno had two really close flybys of Io during Juno’s extended mission,” said the mission’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “And while each flyby provided data on the tormented moon that exceeded our expectations, the data from this latest — and more distant — flyby really blew our minds. This is the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded on the most volcanic world in our solar system — so that’s really saying something.”

The source of Io’s torment: Jupiter. About the size of Earth’s Moon, Io is extremely close to the mammoth gas giant, and its elliptical orbit whips it around Jupiter once every 42.5 hours. As the distance varies, so does the planet’s gravitational pull, which leads to the moon being relentlessly squeezed. The result: immense energy from frictional heating that melts portions of Io’s interior, resulting in a seemingly endless series of lava plumes and ash venting into its atmosphere from the estimated 400 volcanoes that riddle its surface.

Close Flybys

Designed to capture the infrared light (which isn’t visible to the human eye) emerging from deep inside Jupiter, JIRAM probes the gas giant’s weather layer, peering 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below its cloud tops. But since NASA extended Juno’s mission, the team has also used the instrument to study the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. 

Images of Io captured in 2024 by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno show signif-icant and visible surface changes (indicated by the arrows) near the Jovian moon’s south pole. These changes occurred between the 66th and 68th perijove, or the point during Juno’s orbit when it is closest to Jupiter.

Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Jason Perry

During its extended mission, Juno’s trajectory passes by Io every other orbit, flying over the same part of the moon each time. Previously, the spacecraft made close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, getting within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of its surface. The latest flyby took place on Dec. 27, 2024, bringing the spacecraft within about 46,200 miles (74,400 kilometers) of the moon, with the infrared instrument trained on Io’s southern hemisphere.

Io Brings the Heat

“JIRAM detected an event of extreme infrared radiance — a massive hot spot — in Io’s southern hemisphere so strong that it saturated our detector,” said Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. “However, we have evidence what we detected is actually a few closely spaced hot spots that emitted at the same time, suggestive of a subsurface vast magma chamber system. The data supports that this is the most intense volcanic eruption ever recorded on Io.”

The JIRAM science team estimates the as-yet-unnamed feature spans 40,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers). The previous record holder was Io’s Loki Patera, a lava lake of about 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers). The total power value of the new hot spot’s radiance measured well above 80 trillion watts.

Picture This

The feature was also captured by the mission’s JunoCam visible light camera. The team compared JunoCam images from the two previous Io flybys with those the instrument collected on Dec. 27. And while these most recent images are of lower resolution since Juno was farther away, the relative changes in surface coloring around the newly discovered hot spot were clear. Such changes in Io’s surface are known in the planetary science community to be associated with hot spots and volcanic activity.

An eruption of this magnitude is likely to leave long-lived signatures. Other large eruptions on Io have created varied features, such as pyroclastic deposits (composed rock fragments spewed out by a volcano), small lava flows that may be fed by fissures, and volcanic-plume deposits rich in sulfur and sulfur dioxide.

Juno will use an upcoming, more distant flyby of Io on March 3 to look at the hot spot again and search for changes in the landscape. Earth-based observations of this region of the moon may also be possible.  

“While it is always great to witness events that rewrite the record books, this new hot spot can potentially do much more,” said Bolton. “The intriguing feature could improve our understanding of volcanism not only on Io but on other worlds as well.”

More About Juno

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft. Various other institutions around the U.S. provided several of the other scientific instruments on Juno.

More information about Juno is available at:

https://www.nasa.gov/juno 

Source: NASA Juno Mission Spots Most Powerful Volcanic Activity on Io to Date - NASA

Method enables protein labeling of tens of millions of densely packed cells in organ-scale tissues

In this figure extracted from the research study, staining of proteins highlights various cell type markers: neurons overall (cyan), and cells specifically involved with neurotransmitters dopamine (yellow) and acetylcholine (magenta). Credit: Chung Lab/MIT Picower Institute

A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, the team was able to richly label whole rodent brains and other large tissue samples in a single day.

In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also demonstrate that the ability to label proteins with antibodies at the single-cell level across whole brains can reveal insights left hidden by other widely used labeling methods.

Profiling the proteins that cells are making is a staple of studies in biology, neuroscience and related fields because the proteins a cell is expressing at a given moment can reflect the functions the cell is trying to perform or its response to its circumstances, such as disease or treatment.

As much as microscopy and labeling technologies have advanced, enabling innumerable discoveries, scientists have still lacked a reliable and practical way of tracking protein expression at the level of millions of densely packed individual cells in whole, 3D intact tissues such as an entire mouse brain or a full region of a human brain.

Often confined to thin tissue sections under slides, scientists therefore haven't had tools to thoroughly appreciate cellular protein expression in the whole, connected systems in which it occurs.

"Conventionally, investigating the molecules within cells requires dissociating tissue into single cells or slicing it into thin sections, as light and chemicals required for analysis cannot penetrate deep into tissues," said study senior author Kwanghun Chung, associate professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT.

"Our lab developed technologies such as CLARITY and SHIELD, which enable investigation of whole organs by rendering them transparent, but we now needed a way to chemically label whole organs to gain useful scientific insights."

"Imagine marinating a thick steak by simply dipping it in sauce. The outer layers absorb the marinade quickly and intensely, while the inner layers remain largely untouched unless the meat is soaked for an extended period. The same principle applies to chemical processing of tissues: if cells within a tissue are not uniformly processed, they cannot be quantitatively compared.

"The challenge is even greater for protein labeling, as the chemicals we use for labeling are hundreds of times larger than those in marinades. As a result, it can take weeks for these molecules to diffuse into intact organs, making uniform chemical processing of organ-scale tissues virtually impossible and extremely slow." 

A mouse brain hemisphere stained with various cell type markers: neurons overall (cyan), and cells specifically involved with neurotransmitters dopamine (yellow) and acetylcholine (magenta). Credit: Chung Lab/MIT Picower Institute

The new approach, called "CuRVE," represents a major advance—years in the making—toward that goal by demonstrating a fundamentally new approach to uniformly processing large and dense tissues whole.

In the study, the researchers explain how they overcame the technical barriers via an implementation of CuRVE called "eFLASH," and provide copious vivid demonstrations of the technology, including how it yielded new neuroscience insights.

"This is a significant leap, especially in terms of the actual performance of the technology," said co-lead author Dae Hee Yun, a former MIT graduate student and now a senior application engineer at LifeCanvas Technologies, a startup company Chung founded to disseminate the tools his lab invents.

The paper's other lead author is Young-Gyun Park, a former MIT postdoctoral researcher now an assistant professor at KAIST in South Korea.  

by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Source: New method enables protein labeling of tens of millions of densely packed cells in organ-scale tissues  

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NASA Finds Ingredients of Life in Fragments of Lost World - NASA Goddard - UNIVERSE

 

NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Sample Reveals Mix of Life’s Ingredients

 

In this video frame, Jason Dworkin holds up a vial that contains part of the sample from asteroid Bennu delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Regolith Explorer) mission in 2023. Dworkin is the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Credit: NASA/James Tralie

Lee esta nota de prensa en español aquí.

Studies of rock and dust from asteroid Bennu delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security–Regolith Explorer) spacecraft have revealed molecules that, on our planet, are key to life, as well as a history of saltwater that could have served as the “broth” for these compounds to interact and combine.

The findings do not show evidence for life itself, but they do suggest the conditions necessary for the emergence of life were widespread across the early solar system, increasing the odds life could have formed on other planets and moons.

“NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission already is rewriting the textbook on what we understand about the beginnings of our solar system,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Asteroids provide a time capsule into our home planet’s history, and Bennu’s samples are pivotal in our understanding of what ingredients in our solar system existed before life started on Earth.”

In research papers published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy, scientists from NASA and other institutions shared results of the first in-depth analyses of the minerals and molecules in the Bennu samples, which OSIRIS-REx delivered to Earth in 2023.

Detailed in the Nature Astronomy paper, among the most compelling detections were amino acids – 14 of the 20 that life on Earth uses to make proteins – and all five nucleobases that life on Earth uses to store and transmit genetic instructions in more complex terrestrial biomolecules, such as DNA and RNA, including how to arrange amino acids into proteins.

Scientists also described exceptionally high abundances of ammonia in the Bennu samples. Ammonia is important to biology because it can react with formaldehyde, which also was detected in the samples, to form complex molecules, such as amino acids – given the right conditions. When amino acids link up into long chains, they make proteins, which go on to power nearly every biological function.

These building blocks for life detected in the Bennu samples have been found before in extraterrestrial rocks. However, identifying them in a pristine sample collected in space supports the idea that objects that formed far from the Sun could have been an important source of the raw precursor ingredients for life throughout the solar system.

“The clues we’re looking for are so minuscule and so easily destroyed or altered from exposure to Earth’s environment,” said Danny Glavin, a senior sample scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and co-lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper. “That’s why some of these new discoveries would not be possible without a sample-return mission, meticulous contamination-control measures, and careful curation and storage of this precious material from Bennu.”

While Glavin’s team analyzed the Bennu samples for hints of life-related compounds, their colleagues, led by Tim McCoy, curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, and Sara Russell, cosmic mineralogist at the Natural History Museum in London, looked for clues to the environment these molecules would have formed. Reporting in the journal Nature, scientists further describe evidence of an ancient environment well-suited to kickstart the chemistry of life.

Ranging from calcite to halite and sylvite, scientists identified traces of 11 minerals in the Bennu sample that form as water containing dissolved salts evaporates over long periods of time, leaving behind the salts as solid crystals.

Similar brines have been detected or suggested across the solar system, including at the dwarf planet Ceres and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Although scientists have previously detected several evaporites in meteorites that fall to Earth’s surface, they have never seen a complete set that preserves an evaporation process that could have lasted thousands of years or more. Some minerals found in Bennu, such as trona, were discovered for the first time in extraterrestrial samples.

“These papers really go hand in hand in trying to explain how life’s ingredients actually came together to make what we see on this aqueously altered asteroid,” said McCoy.

For all the answers the Bennu sample has provided, several questions remain. Many amino acids can be created in two mirror-image versions, like a pair of left and right hands. Life on Earth almost exclusively produces the left-handed variety, but the Bennu samples contain an equal mixture of both. This means that on early Earth, amino acids may have started out in an equal mixture, as well. The reason life “turned left” instead of right remains a mystery.

“OSIRIS-REx has been a highly successful mission,” said Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA Goddard and co-lead author on the Nature Astronomy paper. “Data from OSIRIS-REx adds major brushstrokes to a picture of a solar system teeming with the potential for life. Why we, so far, only see life on Earth and not elsewhere, that’s the truly tantalizing question.”

NASA Goddard provided overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson, is the principal investigator. The university leads the science team and the mission’s science observation planning and data processing. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft and provided flight operations. NASA Goddard and KinetX Aerospace were responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Curation for OSIRIS-REx takes place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. International partnerships on this mission include the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter instrument from CSA (Canadian Space Agency) and asteroid sample science collaboration with JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 mission. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information on the OSIRIS-REx mission, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex 

Source: NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Sample Reveals Mix of Life’s Ingredients - NASA  

How NASA Found the Ingredients for Life on an Asteroid - Listen to the Podcast

NASA's Curious Universe

Season 8Episode 6Jan 29, 2025

► Listen Now!

Episode description: 

How did life begin? It’s one of science’s biggest questions, but it’s impossible to answer on Earth, where ancient clues have been buried by the planet’s shifting surface. Instead, scientists are looking beyond our own planet, to asteroids like Bennu, a distant fragment of a lost world. In 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample of Bennu’s surface and brought it back to Earth. Ever since, scientists have been hard at work studying the fragments of asteroid Bennu. Now, they’re ready to reveal the results—our best look yet at a time capsule from the early solar system that once fostered the ingredients for life. 

Source: How NASA Found the Ingredients for Life on an Asteroid - NASA

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