Moon Maps

One of my local bookshops finally had not one, but three copies of Steph Swainston's second book, one of which I am now a quarter of a way into. (Hopefully the other two will be identical.) Meanwhile, Rosaly Lopes is guest-blogging over at the Planetary Society Blog.

Rosaly Lopes is Lead Scientist for Geophysics and Planetary Geosciences at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an investigation scientist on the Cassini Titan RADAR mapper team. Her main research interests concern volcanoes in the solar system, especially on Earth and Io. She recently published The Volcano Adventure Guide, an adventurous tourist's guidebook to the safe exploration of Earth's diverse volcanoes.

If you want to hear what she has to say about a certain Kuiper Belt Object that has been in the news a lot lately, you might want to read her first post. Some of us, however, are sick to death of the thing, and are more apt to find blissful relief in this post on planetary naming conventions, which includes the following rather lovely image of a volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io:

(Image page at NASA,with more information and a larger version.)

Among other things, she includes a link to these people, the guys who get to name all the geological features in the solar system. And here's something any traveller may need: maps of the moons of Jupiter! For a start, you'd probably want to keep your distance from Loki on Io, which is the area going kablooey in the image above.