After painstakingly combing through radar images collected by NASA’s Magellan probe in the 1990s, researchers have found a vent that grew larger – evidence of current volcanic activity
By Alex Wilkins
15 March 2023 Last updated 15 March 2023
The Maat Mons volcano system on the surface of Venus may be active today
NASA/JPL
A volcanic vent on Venus that changed shape over a period of eight months is the first direct evidence that our neighbouring planet is volcanically active.
Venus has many prominent volcanic features, such as vents and the dry beds of lava lakes, but it was unclear whether these were remnants of a distant volcanic past or signs of current activity.
Between 1990 and 1994, NASA’s Magellan satellite used radar to map Venus’s surface in detail, including its volcanic features. Until recently, however, computers were ill-equipped to properly analyse the vast amount of data it generated.
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The way in which Magellan mapped Venus’s surface, taking photos every eight months at different viewing angles, also made it impossible to automatically search for changes in surface features. The only way to identify differences was to look through the images by eye.
“The daunting aspect of this is it’s a needle-in-a-haystack search, where there’s no guarantee that the needle exists,” says Robert Herrick at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who, along with Scott Hensley at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, presented the findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, on 15 March.
By combing through areas of Venus’s surface in which they thought volcanic activity was more likely, the pair found the vent, which is in the Maat Mons volcano system, home to the planet’s highest volcano.