Venus on Earth: NASA’s VERITAS science team studies volcanic Iceland

With its crushing atmospheric stress, clouds of sulfuric acid, and searing floor temperature, Venus is an particularly difficult place to review. However scientists know that observing its floor can present key insights into the habitability and evolution of rocky planets like our personal.

So to get a worldwide perspective of Venus whereas staying properly above its hellish environment, NASA’s VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy) mission is scheduled to launch inside a decade to survey the planet’s floor from orbit, uncovering clues concerning the nature of its inside.

To put the groundwork for the mission, members of the worldwide VERITAS science workforce traveled to Iceland for a two-week marketing campaign in August to make use of the volcanic island as a Venus stand-in, or analog. Places on our planet typically are used as analogs for different planets, particularly to assist put together applied sciences and strategies meant for extra uninviting environments.

“Iceland is a volcanic nation that sits atop a sizzling plume. Venus is a volcanic planet with plentiful geological proof for lively plumes,” mentioned Suzanne Smrekar, senior analysis scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the VERITAS principal investigator. “Its geological similarities make Iceland a wonderful place to review Venus on Earth, serving to the science workforce put together for Venus.”

The VERITAS mission will depend on a state-of-the-art synthetic aperture radar to create 3D international maps and a near-infrared spectrometer to tell apart between the main rock sorts on Venus’s floor. However to raised perceive what the spacecraft’s radar will “see” on the planet, the VERITAS science workforce would wish to check radar observations of Iceland’s terrain from the air with measurements taken on the bottom.

From air to floor

For the primary half of the marketing campaign, the VERITAS science workforce studied the Askja volcanic deposits and the Holuhraun lava area within the Icelandic Highlands, an lively area that includes younger rock and up to date lava flows. For the second half, they traveled to the volcanically lively Fagradalsfjall area on the Reykjanes Peninsula of southwestern Iceland. The barren and rocky landscapes of each resemble Venus’s floor, which is regarded as rejuvenated by lively volcanism.

Nineteen scientists from the U.S., Germany, Italy, and Iceland camped and labored lengthy hours to review the floor roughness and different properties of rocks in these areas, gathering lab samples as properly. In the meantime, flights led by the German Aerospace Heart (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, or DLR) collected radar information from above.

“The JPL-led science workforce was engaged on the bottom whereas our DLR companions flew overhead to assemble aerial radar photos of the areas we had been finding out,” mentioned Daniel Nunes, VERITAS deputy mission scientist at JPL and Iceland marketing campaign planning lead. “The radar brightness of the floor pertains to the properties of that floor, together with texture, roughness, and water content material. We collected data within the area to ground-truth the radar data that we’ll use that to tell the science that VERITAS will do at Venus.”

Flying aboard DLR’s Dornier 228-212 plane about 20,000 ft (6,000 meters) above the bottom, the artificial aperture radar collected S-band (radio waves with a wavelength of about 12 centimeters, or 4.7 inches) and X-band (about 3 centimeters, or 1.2 inches) information. The shorter wavelength of X-band information—the radio frequency VERITAS will make use of—permits using a extra compact antenna than S-band, which was utilized by NASA’s Magellan mission to map practically the whole floor of Venus within the early Nineties.

By observing the floor in each bands in Iceland, the science workforce will refine pc algorithms that may assist VERITAS establish floor modifications on Venus which have occurred since Magellan’s mission. Detecting modifications during the last 40 years will enable them to establish key areas of geologic exercise (reminiscent of lively volcanoes) on Venus.

A key objective for the marketing campaign was to additionally create a pattern library of as many volcanic floor textures in Iceland as attainable to raised perceive Venus’s vary of eruption kinds. A DLR area workforce additionally collected compositional data with a digicam that emulates the Venus Emissivity Mapper (VEM) instrument the German Aerospace Heart is constructing for VERITAS. This information will assist the spectral library being created on the Planetary Spectroscopy Laboratory in Berlin.

“The totally different floor traits and options seen on Venus relate to volcanic processes, which relate again to the inside of Venus,” mentioned Smrekar. “This information goes to be beneficial to VERITAS to assist us higher perceive Venus. It is going to additionally assist the European Area Company’s EnVision mission, which can research Venus’s floor with S-band radar, and the neighborhood at giant that desires to know radar observations of volcanic planetary surfaces.”

However the worth of the two-week Iceland marketing campaign went past science, offering a team-building alternative that may resonate for years to return, mentioned Nunes.

“It was a terrific dynamic,” he added. “We pushed arduous and helped one another out. From borrowing gear to driving to the research websites and shopping for provides, everybody hustled to make it occur.”