(Description below)
VENUS WITHOUT HER CLOUDS
The surface of Venus is perpetually covered by a veil of thick clouds and remains hidden from even the powerful telescopic eyes of earth-bound astronomers. But in the early 1990s, using imaging radar, the Venus orbiting Magellan spacecraft was able to lift the veil from the face of Venus and produced spectacular high resolution images of the planet's surface. Magellan synthetic aperture radar mosaics from the first cycle of Magellan mapping are mapped onto a computer-simulated globe to create this image. Data gaps are filled with Pioneer Venus Orbiter data, or a constant mid-range value. Simulated color is used to enhance small-scale structure. The simulated hues are based on color images recorded by the Soviet Venera 13 and 14 spacecraft.
The Magellan spacecraft was launched aboard space shuttle Atlantis in May 1989 and began mapping the surface of Venus in September 1990. The spacecraft continued to orbit Venus for four years, returning high-resolution images, altimetry, thermal emissions and gravity maps of 98 percent of the surface. Magellan spacecraft operations ended on October 12, 1994, when the radio contact was lost with the spacecraft during its controlled descent into the deeper portions of the Venusian atmosphere.
This global view of the surface of Venus is centered at 180 degrees east longitude. The bright area running roughly across the middle represents the largest highland region of Venus known as Aphrodite Terra. The scattered dark patches in this image are halos surrounding some of the younger impact craters. This global data set reveals a number of craters consistent with an average Venus surface age of 300 million to 500 million years.
The image was produced by the Solar System Visualization project and the Magellan science team at the JPL Multimission Image Processing Laboratory.