Destinations: What exactly is a volcano? A volcano is a geological landform usually generated by the eruption through a planet's surface of magma, molten rock welling up from the planet's interior. And not just on our home planet Earth. Volcanoes exist throughout the solar system, and in some pretty interesting forms.
Many different types of volcanoes exist, including cryovolcanoes (ice), found particularly on some moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune and even mud volcanoes. On Earth, volcanoes tend to occur near the boundaries of crustal plates. Important exceptions exist in hotspot volcanoes, which occur at locations far from plate boundaries.
Missions: STEREO - (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) is a 2-year NASA mission employing two nearly identical space-based observatories to provide the very first, 3-D "stereo" images of the sun to study the nature of coronal mass ejections.
Venus Express is now orbiting Venus and gathering spectacular data on Venus' many volcanoes.
Viking 2 celebrartes its 30th anniversary of the arrival at Mars.
NASA continues its rapid preparation of the space shuttle Atlantis for a hopeful launch later this month.
Features: To learn more about volcanoes read about the Explosive Volcanic Eruptions on the Moon. You can also learn more about the surface of Io in the feature
Big Mountain, Big Landslide on Jupiter's Moon, Io.
Fast Lesson Finder: K-12 Activities: Search our Fast Lesson Finder to find classroom lessons related to icy worlds. This month several activities describe volcano related lessons, including Boiling Water Below Its Boiling Point (126 KB PDF) and Changes Inside Planets (206 KB PDF).
People: Meet Michael Malin : A Mars volcano expert and much more.
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