Four hundred thousand kilometres out from Jupiter, where the pale banded view of a planet with a red storm fills most of space, lays the path of Io. It is the innermost of the four large Galilean moons, a volcanic, draconic creature that orbits Jupiter inside the giant’s wide spanned magnetosphere, generating current.
Io is the golden daughter in the solar system. A young surface shifts in different shades of gold and yellow covering the iron sulphide core. Ever changing volcanoes spew out sulphide gasses and streams of basaltic lava from her infernal insides. Io can be said to be alive in a sense. Tidal forces twist it, and pull the crust and core, generating extreme heat, up to fifteen hundred Kelvin or more. She is the geologically most active object in the solar system, and unlike other moons in the outer regions, for this reason, she is much more than a dead body of ice.
In mythology Io was impregnated by the Olympic Zeus, taking every chance to betray his wife Hera. Now, in orbit far distant from Earth Io finds herself in wedlock in a tidal resonance with Jupiter, Europa and Ganymede. For every orbit Ganymede makes, being farthest from Jupiter, Europa manages two inside of it, and Io four in close orbit. This resonance tears Io and her mountains and core into dust. Then the Jovian magnetosphere lifts a tonne of this ionized matter and atoms off her every second into a thin atmosphere before these particles is pulled off the moon in a dusty trail that eventually escapes the planets system into the black of space.
Somewhere here between the moon and the planet, in the cauldron of gravitational energy and matter, in one specific moment a globe appeared. It cast around it an intense azure shadow of time and space, covering a golden moon and a red planet with a strange colour they had never seen before. It had come quite a long way, in what most people would say to be a very short time considering the distance travelled. It soon faded, but the globe remained, drawing energy from the cosmic resonance.
After some time the object started to move, finding its own trajectory, entering orbit, adding one to the sixty or so satellites circling over Jupiter’s clouded surface. Emitting a signal.
Io is the golden daughter in the solar system. A young surface shifts in different shades of gold and yellow covering the iron sulphide core. Ever changing volcanoes spew out sulphide gasses and streams of basaltic lava from her infernal insides. Io can be said to be alive in a sense. Tidal forces twist it, and pull the crust and core, generating extreme heat, up to fifteen hundred Kelvin or more. She is the geologically most active object in the solar system, and unlike other moons in the outer regions, for this reason, she is much more than a dead body of ice.
In mythology Io was impregnated by the Olympic Zeus, taking every chance to betray his wife Hera. Now, in orbit far distant from Earth Io finds herself in wedlock in a tidal resonance with Jupiter, Europa and Ganymede. For every orbit Ganymede makes, being farthest from Jupiter, Europa manages two inside of it, and Io four in close orbit. This resonance tears Io and her mountains and core into dust. Then the Jovian magnetosphere lifts a tonne of this ionized matter and atoms off her every second into a thin atmosphere before these particles is pulled off the moon in a dusty trail that eventually escapes the planets system into the black of space.
Somewhere here between the moon and the planet, in the cauldron of gravitational energy and matter, in one specific moment a globe appeared. It cast around it an intense azure shadow of time and space, covering a golden moon and a red planet with a strange colour they had never seen before. It had come quite a long way, in what most people would say to be a very short time considering the distance travelled. It soon faded, but the globe remained, drawing energy from the cosmic resonance.
After some time the object started to move, finding its own trajectory, entering orbit, adding one to the sixty or so satellites circling over Jupiter’s clouded surface. Emitting a signal.
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