In the early 1990s, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft sent back information from Venus that showed there were still volcanoes on the planet’s surface. Now, a new look at that data shows that they have found at least one active volcano on Venus, and future missions to the Earth could deliver even more proof that it isn’t dead yet.
The researchers wrote a paper about their findings and sent it to Science. Based on these results, an active volcano on Venus is still changing the planet’s surface by pouring lava out of lava vents around it.
But the researchers had to be careful with the information they had. Since the data from Magellan is 30 years old, they wanted to ensure it wasn’t caused by the spacecraft itself. To figure this out, they chose a place that appeared in more than one data set and then moved it to face the possibly active volcano on Venus.
By doing this, they saw that a volcano vent near Maat Mons looked rounder in one picture. But when the data from Magellan was used to make the following picture, the researchers saw that the vent looked more like a kidney. Also, a bright spot in the data was a new flow of lava from the active volcano that was moving across Venus’s surface.
It’s an exciting find that gives scientists more information to look into, especially as NASA and others plan future space missions to Venus to learn more about the planet. Since the best pictures we have of Venus are from the 1980s, scientists have wanted to learn more about Earth’s evil twin for a long time.
With the success of the Artemis mission and NASA’s plans to learn more about the rest of our solar system, we may learn more about the active volcanoes on Venus and how they helped form our neighboring planet.
