Just Like Being There Io was a bad place for something to go wrong.
The fifth of Jupiter’s eighty moons, Io was deep inside a zone of radiation produced by solar particles trapped in the gas giant’s magnetic field. Heated by the gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter and its outer moons, the volcanoes that covered its surface erupted almost constantly, sending plumes of sulphur hundreds of kilometres into space.
Keith Mackay’s spacecraft had landed on Io, and it was in trouble.
The spacecraft had touched down on a volcano called Emakong Patera with a not-so-soft landing that threw up a large cloud of sulphur. But according to the mission schedule, it should have landed ten minutes ago, well before Keith linked-in with the ansible. He immediately checked the seismometer, and one look at its peaks told him this was a bad time to visit.
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