Saturday, March 18 2023 – 09:08 WIB
LIVE Techno – When scientists took a closer look at archival images of the surface of Venus, they found something new: evidence of volcanic activity there.
The NASA (Aviation and Space Administration) spacecraft, Magellan captured images in the early 1990s as it circled our closest planetary neighbor which is similar in size and composition to Earth.
A new analysis from the orbiter’s perspective of a region near the Venusian equator reveals a volcanic vent that changed shape and increased in size rapidly over a span of eight months.
The vent images are direct geological evidence and the first of recent volcanic activity on the surface of Venus, according to the researchers.
A study detailing the findings was published Wednesday in the journal Science and presented at the 54th Conference on Lunar and Planetary Sciences in The Woodlands, Texas, United States (US).
The Magellan mission was the first mission to image the entire surface of Venus before the spacecraft deliberately plunged into the planet’s hot and toxic atmosphere in 1994 to collect the final data.
But a new fleet of missions will head to Venus within a decade, including missions VERITAS, Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy, according to the CNN website, Saturday, March 18, 2023.
