NEW YORK: Against the background that only spacecraft radar can penetrate the cloudy surface of Venus; scientists at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) have deployed heavy Earth-based radar technology to map the surface of Venus.
Utilizing earlier work done by the Pioneer and Soviet Venera spacecraft in the 1980s and the Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s, the NRAO-affiliated astronomers transmitted radar waves from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, bounced them off of the surface of Venus and then received their echoes at the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia.
Due to be published in April, findings revealed that this method was utilized in 1988, 1999, 2001, and then in 2012 in a technique that enables astronomers to obtain signs of activity in far-away Venus. This activity could be volcanic eruptions or any dynamic activity that will provide researchers with penetration into Venus’ geologic story and subsurface conditions.
“It is painstaking to compare radar images to search for evidence of change, but the work is ongoing,” said lead author Bruce Campbell, a senior scientist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
“In the meantime, combining images from this and an earlier observing period is yielding a wealth of insight about other processes that alter the surface of Venus,” Campbell added. He was assisted on the research by astronomers from Cornell University, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the Arecibo Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
According to information provided by Discovery News, Venus seems to possess a surface that is young and filled with volcanoes as well as terrains that are folded and even ridged. There also does not appear to be any tectonic activity on the surface of the planet, and it is not clear if the kind of geological processes that play out here on Earth occur in Venus, the second planet away from the sun.
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