Benningfield reports that it's been a quarter of a century since the Magellan spacecraft burned up as it plunged into the atmosphere of Venus. The probe’s radar mapper, which peered through the planet’s clouds, had revealed a rugged surface of high “continents,” volcanic mountains, spidery domes, and deep canyons. Scientists interpreted the chaotic landscape as evidence of massive outpourings of molten rock that repaved the planet’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago. Modern-day Venus was considered dead, or almost so—a world whose craggy face had been frozen in time, but new research suggests that the surface of Venus is busy, but it may take new missions to the planet to confirm this.
“These ideas developed that Venus is geologically dead—it had this catastrophic resurfacing and now is completely devoid of geologic activity,” said Suzanne
Smrekar, a senior researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. In the past few years, though, planetary scientists have looked at Magellan’s observations in new ways, leading them to develop a more nuanced picture of the planet’s history. The Magellan images, combined with observations by more recent orbiters, have provided hints that Venus could be quite active today. The new findings have whetted the appetites of many researchers for new Venus missions—perhaps a “Magellan 2.0” orbiter to snap higher-resolution pictures of the surface and make better maps of the planet’s topography or a long-duration balloon that would measure
volcanic eruptions through ripples in the planet’s atmosphere.
Such missions would teach us more not just about Venus, the scientists say, but also about Earth and a whole class of exoplanets. “Venus is an Earth-sized planet, and now—who knew?!—there are Earth-sized planets all over the galaxy,” said Martha Gilmore, a professor of geology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. “So now, Venus is even more relevant for that reason.”
An interesting article. Read on .... pp. 23 to 27.
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