Washington, July 14 : Using data collected by NASA's Juno spacecraft, scientists have got clues to a previously undiscovered volcano on the Jupiter moon Io.

With its Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, the Juno spacecraft found a new heat source close to the south pole of Io, NASA said on Saturday.

"The new Io hotspot JIRAM picked up is about 300 kilometres from the nearest previously mapped hotspot," Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, Italy, said in a statement.

"We are not ruling out movement or modification of a previously discovered hot spot, but it is difficult to imagine one could travel such a distance and still be considered the same feature," Mura added.

The infrared data were collected on December 16, 2017, when Juno was about 470,000 kilometers away from the moon.

The Juno team will continue to evaluate data collected on the December 16 flyby, as well as JIRAM data that will be collected during future (and even closer) flybys of Io, NASA said.

Past NASA missions of exploration that have visited the Jovian system (Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons), along with ground-based observations, have located over 150 active volcanoes on Io so far.

Scientists estimate that about another 250 or so are waiting to be discovered.

Juno has logged nearly 235 million kilometres since entering Jupiter's orbit on July 4, 2016.

Juno's 13th science pass will be on July 16, the US space agency said.




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Lucknow(PTI): Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati on Saturday accused the Congress of long-standing neglect towards the Dalits and tribals.

In a post on X, Mayawati dismissed Rahul Gandhi's admission of Congress's failure in fulfilling the political, economic, and reservation-related aspirations of these people as "not new."

She called the leader's stance "self-serving politics" and his party adopting consistently "a sad and unfortunate attitude" towards the SC/ST communities.

The Dalit leader said that it was this very behaviour of the oldest part of the country that compelled these communities to form their own party.

"Consequently," Mayawati said, "the Congress party has continuously remained out of power in major states, including Uttar Pradesh. Now, after losing power, they are suddenly remembering these communities, which can only be described as crocodile tears given their perpetual deceitful intentions and policies."

She extended her criticism to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, accusing it also of hypocrisy.

The BSP chief said the Congress kept in abeyance the full benefits of reservation, failed to honour Dr B R Ambedkar with the Bharat Ratna for nearly 40 years after Independence.

Mayawati said that all "casteist parties" collude to effectively render SC, ST, and OBC reservations "inactive and ineffective" under various pretexts.

They are all "cut from the same cloth," she said.

She claimed that her government in Uttar Pradesh guaranteed "safety, dignity, and welfare" of all sections of society, including the poor, the oppressed, and the Bahujan Samaj.

"The welfare of the nation's Bahujans is solely inherent in the BSP's iron guarantee," said the four-time UP chief minister.