As each NASA and the European Area Company (ESA) plan missions to Venus, scientists are persevering with to find out about our sister planet — together with volcanic exercise.
Venus’ panorama is plagued by volcanoes that had been clearly energetic up to now. However whether or not any are nonetheless erupting within the current is much less clear. Many researchers have suspected this to be the case, and proof has emerged of lava flows that seem like comparatively current. However direct proof of the before-and-after results of an eruption had not emerged till researchers combed by way of archival information from NASA’s Magellan mission from the Nineties.
Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist on the College of Alaska in Fairbanks, reexamined the over 30-year-old information and introduced the findings final week on the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. Herrick in contrast radar imagery of the Alta Regio area from February 1991 to information from October of the identical yr. The world hosts two volcanoes — Maat Mons and Ozza Mons. Trying on the pictures, he seen that one volcanic vent close to Maat Mons had expanded considerably between datasets. The October information additionally had a shiny characteristic extending from the vent that seemed like a attainable lava move.
Herrick and Scott Hensley, a former Magellan radar crew member at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), used laptop modeling to check totally different geologic eventualities that might trigger a sq. mile-sized (2.2 sq. kilometers) vent to turn out to be misshapen and double in measurement. The one reply was an eruption.
“Solely a few the simulations matched the imagery, and the most certainly state of affairs is that volcanic exercise occurred on Venus’ floor throughout Magellan’s mission,” mentioned Hensley in a NASA press release. Hensley argues the discovering “confirms there’s fashionable geological exercise” on the planet. The outcomes had been revealed March 15 in Science.
