Scientists have achieved something remarkable – they’ve seen actual proof that volcanoes are active on the planet that’s like Earth. They need to know more now, so they have a mission called VERITAS to get them this information.
Scientists found evidence that Venus recently had a volcanic eruption! They used old pictures taken by NASA’s Magellan mission in the 1990s to make this discovery. The pictures showed a volcano vent getting bigger over the course of just one year.
Venus is sometimes called the “evil twin” of Earth. That’s because they are both similar in size and composition, yet Venus has a terribly hostile environment with clouds made up of sulfuric acid and an extremely hot surface temperature of over 900 degrees Fahrenheit (475 Celsius). In contrast, Earth is much more pleasant with a mild climate which makes it friendly to life as we know it. Therefore, Venus or Earth’s “evil twin” presents such a stark difference to our planet’s nice conditions.
NASA is planning a mission to Venus soon! It’s called VERITAS which stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy. The goal of the mission is to study why Venus looks so different from Earth even though they are close in size. The orbiter will examine how this planet’s deep insides affected its crust, making it covered in volcanic plains with a thick atmosphere full of toxic air. This mission hopes to figure out how two planets can look so dissimilar!
The selection of NASA’s VERITAS mission motivated Professor Robert Herrick from the University of Alaska Fairbanks to check Magellan data for recent volcanic activities. He didn’t think he will find anything, but after studying and comparing 200 hours’ worth of images in different Magellan orbits, Robert was surprised to see that the same area eight months later had certain physical changes that suggested a volcanic eruption.
The people who looked into this topic and what they found were put together in an article in a magazine called Science. The same results from their search were also discussed during the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in Texas on March 15.
Uncovering Venus’ Volcanic Activity
Herrick found some geological changes in a region called Atla Regio. It’s near the equator on Venus, and it has two huge volcanoes which are called Ozza Mons and Maat Mons. People had thought this place was active with volcanoes, but there wasn’t really any proof until recently. Herrick looked closely at some radar images of Maat Mons and he noticed that something changed between February and October 1991.
In February, there was a small vent area that measured less than 1 square mile. It had deep walls and worn-away lava around the slope, which suggested that something exciting was happening here. Eight months later, the same tiny vent had grown to twice its size and become misshapen with a lava lake up to the brim!
The problem was that these two observations were not the same because they were seen from different angles, making it hard to compare. Plus, the data was very old and low quality which made things even more complicated.
Herrick and JPL’s Scott Hensley, who studies radar data like Magellan’s, got together to figure out the cause of a change in the vent. To try to solve this, they made digital replicas of how things were before and after, and tested different ideas like landslides. After looking at their models, they concluded that an eruption must have happened to cause the change.
According to Hensley, a couple of experiments showed that lava probably came out of Venus’ surface during the Magellan mission. This proves that Venus still has activity happening on it today. Scientists compare the lava flow from Maat Mons to the eruption in Hawaii in 2018.
Investigating the Mysteries of Venus with VERITAS and Magellan Telescope Data
The VERITAS team, which includes Herrick and Hensley, is really excited to see how their high-tech science tools and detailed data can add even more knowledge of Venus on top of what the powerful Magellan telescope already revealed.
Jennifer Whitten from Tulane University in New Orleans said that Venus is a mysterious planet and scientists have only recently discovered that it had a big volcanic eruption happening just 30 years ago. She said that this discovery was just the beginning of many more interesting findings researchers will make.
VERITAS is a special spacecraft that will take pictures of Venus from space. It will use advanced radar and infrared to learn what its surface is made of, and measure the planet’s gravity to figure out what’s inside it. All this data will help us understand more about the history and geography of Venus.
In the past, researching data on Venus was difficult because all they had were boxes of CDs with information sent to them through mail. However, VERITAS’ data can now be accessed online which makes it much easier for scientists to look into the mysteries of the planet. They can also use advanced technologies like machine learning to help analyze and better understand Venus.
In the early 2030s, a spacecraft from the European Space Agency is going to be sent to Venus. It will have something called a synthetic aperture radar (called VenSAR) that was built at JPL, and it will also have a spectrometer. Two people who are members of the science team for this mission are called Hensley and Herrick.
The Magellan mission was a space exploration where Venusian volcanoes were observed for changes in the surface. Robert R. Herrick and Scott Hensley wrote about this findings in the journal Science on March 15th, 2023 with a DOI of 10.1126/science.abm7735.
In 2021, NASA chose two missions – VERITAS and DAVINCI – to go to the planet Venus. Several organizations like Lockheed Martin Space, the Italian Space Agency, the German Aerospace Center and France’s Centre National d’dudes Spatiales are working together to help make this happen. NASA’s Mission Directorate’s Planetary Science Division in Washington has employed NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama for managing the Discovery Program related to these missions.
