Podcast Draft for Io: The Angry Red Eye

(my apologies for the lateness in getting this up, this research threw me through a loop. That being said, all the prose I wrote is nonfiction... except for the participant being able to hang out on Io unscathed... that's totally fiction...)

The ground is frozen, sulfur yellow, and blanketed with trillions of tiny crystals.

Your distant vision is punctuated by volcanoes so vast they swell the line of the horizon, erupting umbrellas of magma stretching higher than your vision could take you. But those are the least of your concerns on the moon Io, because when you avert your gaze to the sky to follow the eruptions to where you might expect to be greeted by a sky full of distant stars, a ghastly giant is waiting.

Glaring at you with its scorching red eye is the planet, Jupiter… closer than our moon is to Earth.

To be clear, Jupiter is forty times the length of the moon.

Home base is on the dark side, the antijovian aspect, and starkly across frozen deserts, sulfuric rain, and scorching liquid rivers.

The only fiction in this story is your survival. The rest, down to the foley, is Data.

Welcome to Atrophonica. My name is Anna Brooks, and today we’re on Io.

There is a ground beneath you, but don't count on it being there for long. You can feel it groaning under your boots like a wooden spoon in a tightening vice. And your observation wouldn’t be far from the truth; this moon is being tortured by the orbits of its sisters Ganymede, Enceladus and Europa.

As they swing close to Io, their gravitational fields compress and stretch the planet creating enough internal friction to spawn hundreds of volcanoes, heating parts of it's topography up 1600c degrees despite its normal surface temperature sitting at a frigid -130c.

But inside your suit, you would actually hear this fun fact before you felt it.

On Venus, sound waves travel

faster (making them higher in pitch) because of the 400 degree temperature. On Io, hearing an eruption would be like experiencing a planetary pitch shift, starting low and quiet and ending in what would likely sound like a chorus of silverware erupting into the air.

So you cover your ears and leap back into the quiet safely of the cold.

(to be continued)

SOURCES:

Surface Pressure - http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/ESS590/ioatmos.pdf

Lunar Comparisons - https://www.space.com/18067-moon-atmosphere.html

Basic Info - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/io

More Basic Info (video) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkfDnIQsEXs

Color reference - https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/174427main_image_feature_804_ys_ful.jpg

Topographical Map - http://img.gawkerassets.com/post/8/2012/03/iomapnew.jpg

More insight (general)- https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/io/indepth

Video Lunar Comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2adl6LszcE&t=69s

More on Ionian Lava - http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a26474/io-jupiter-moon-lava-waves/