Word: magellan
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...veil is coming off. Last week NASA's Magellan spacecraft transmitted the most detailed pictures ever made of Earth's next-door neighbor. The radar images revealed a tortured topography with fault-like cracks in surprisingly regular patterns, craters as big as greater Los Angeles and volcanic mountains flanked by congealed rivers of lava at least 320 km (200 miles) long. Says James Head III, a Brown University geologist and member of the Magellan imaging team: "It's a revolutionary new view of Venus...
...revolution almost didn't happen. When Magellan first took up its elliptical orbit around Venus on Aug. 10, its communications system inexplicably stopped working. Then the equipment started up, letting the space probe send back a few tantalizing images -- and stopped once more. Fearful that the spacecraft would lose contact with Earth permanently, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is responsible for Magellan, put the imaging on hold while they tracked down the problem. It was apparently a faulty computer chip. Electronic signals have been rerouted to bypass the flaw, and meanwhile Magellan's control software is being...
...probe keeps working, scientists will by next summer have mapped some % 90% of the planet. Magellan's radar detectors can pick up features as small as 120 meters (394 ft.) across, 10 times smaller than anything ever seen before. That should be enough to begin answering some important questions about the geology and atmosphere of the planet. Although nearly the same size as Earth, Venus has an atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. These gases have created an atmospheric pressure at the surface 90 times that of Earth and led to a greenhouse effect that keeps the temperature...
Many scientists believe the Venusian volcanoes are still capable of erupting, and there is even a chance they may be caught in the act. After finishing a 243-day mapping mission, Magellan will start all over and do it again. Any change in the landscape that shows up in the second version -- new lava or other debris, for example -- would be strong evidence of volcanism, making Venus only the fourth body in the solar system, after Earth, Jupiter's moon Io and Neptune's moon Triton, where eruptions have been spotted...
After a balky start, the Magellan probe is mapping the cloud-shrouded planet by radar. Found so far: giant craters, major lava flows and a webwork of faults...