Active volcanoes on Venus found in Magellan data - EarthSky

Wakey wakey dramatards, it's time for more space news.

I like writing about this stuff, I actually know a load about it, so I'm going to keep doing this until everyone gets sick of it. Instead of reading journ*list articles who know frick all about what they're talking about, why not have some expert information?

For some fun context, Venus is an absolute nightmare planet, and very difficult to survey. It has the fun distinction of not only rotating in the wrong direction (backwards compared to every other planet), but also extremely slowly, with a Venusian day (single rotation) being longer than a Venusian year (rotation around sun). This is worse than being tidal locked (strong gravitational field on a body that locks one side facing towards the parent, like the Moon), where the day is equal to the year.

Venus, Earth, and Mars are in what's called the Goldilocks Zone (or 'habitable' zone if you hate fun), a zone in which planets would get juuuust enough heat to have liquid water. Not too much, not too little, just right. Mars (probably) used to have massive oceans and rivers, and you can still see the scarring from the waterways on the surface. Ages ago, Mars cooled off and the molten core solidified, which means the inner iron core stopped rotating, which killed the magnetic field. With no more magnetic field to protect it, solar wind slowly ionized and blasted away the atmosphere, and with it the oceans, until it became the dead rock you see now. This is why so many rovers are going around mars, looking for cool martian fish that may have been there before.

Where Mars simply no longer supports life, Venus is openly hostile to it. The atmosphere is so dense that the pressure is like being 800m underwater, except instead of water it's all carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. These clouds block the surface from the sky and make it very difficult to photograph with regular cameras. It's so hot down there that the surface temperature will melt lead. We just had no idea what it looked like for the longest time, because you either need to go down there, or have some kind of imaging that gets past the clouds. The Soviets sent a few landers down there in the 70s, where they took some cool photos and then melted like 20 minutes later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_(spacecraft)#/media/File:Magellan_-_artist_depiction.png

Enter Magellan. The Magellan mission was a NASA mission from back in the 90's, aiming to map the gravitational field of Venus, and take some nice photos with what's called Synthetic Apeture Radar (SAR), a radar imaging techinique where some nice math tricks get you really high res photos, and it gets past all of those inconvenient clouds. They found some pretty interesting stuff, namely that there were very few impact craters (unusual), no oceans like on earth, but mostly volcanoes everywhere. The question has always been if they were active or not. Fast forward to today, when the VERITAS (not the news org) mission was selected for flight back (meaning they proposed it and its happening) in 2021, and will launch starting in 2027.

This prompted some scientist, who was bored in a Zoom meeting, to take a look at the old data now that Venus is cool again,and he found that in the 8 months that Magellan was there, one of the mountains it was looking at had changed shape pretty radically (doubled in size)

There's really only one explanation for this, and that's volcanic activity. Which means that Venus is not a geologically dead planet, which is big news. Bottom line is that volcanoes are important for possibility of life, because it introduces some kind of specific chemicals into the environment and keeps the planet warm, which is all I really know. This basically just proves what everyone already knew, but it's kind of cool