Jupiter's moon Io supports its rarefied atmosphere with prolific tidally-driven episodic volcanism. Its largest volcanic plumes erupt violently and exhibit intricate structure, their canopies rising to hundreds of km above the Ionian surface. In early 2007, the NASA New Horizons (NH) spacecraft captured the active Tvashtar plume in a time sequence of panchromatic images at high spatial resolution and observed both discrete "filamentary" patterns in the descending particulate structure, and a prominent traveling canopy wave. These are transient and asymmetric features, indicative of Tvashtar's unresolved and complex vent processes. In this work, we introduce a methodology for identifying vent spatial and temporal scales in the rarefied plume. Three-dimensional DSMC simulations of the collisional gas flowfield are combined with a flow-tracking dust particle model, enabling a broad exploration of parameter space in pursuit of the critical frequencies that qualitatively reproduce the dynamical phenomena observed in Tvashtar's collisional canopy and providing insight into the dynamics of transient extra-terrestrial volcanic plumes.
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