Volcanic spectacle
The Maryland-built and Hopkins-operated New Horizons spacecraft snapped a spectacular photo of the Tvashtar volcano last week as it soared past Io, the innermost of Jupiter's Gallilean moons. It 
caught the Texas-sized volcano in the middle of a huge eruption, shooting debris more than 150 miles into space. The material - much of it sulfur - from Io's volcanic eruptions coats the little moon. Some of it flies off into space, orbiting Jupiter, falling into its atmosphere and creating aurorae, or getting swept up by the solar wind.
To read more, click here. For a New Horizons photo gallery, click here.
New Horizons, launched in January 2006, is en route to the (dwarf) planet Pluto in 2015, and then off into the icy Kuiper Belt beyond. The $700 million mission is mankind's first to Pluto. It is being managed by the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel.
