Mapping Venus's surface in detail

Venus is Earth's mysterious twin, but little is known about the planet's surface and interior due to its thick cloud layer and the relatively few missions that have visited.

In the early 1990s, NASA's Magellan mission revealed that Venus's surface is dotted with massive volcanoes, weathered lava plains, and other evidence of continuous transformation. From this dataset and painstaking manual search, scientists have found one compelling case for surface change. With Discovery funding, Imperial College London is working on spotting these changes more effectively.

"We are developing intelligent software tools to reliably detect and quantify surface change on Venus, using radar imagery, in a semi-automated way," explains Philippa Mason, Imperial College London. "On Earth, this is relatively straightforward, but on Venus it is really challenging."

These open-source tools will be applied to images acquired by next-generation radar instruments on EnVision (ESA) and Veritas (NASA) missions. They will reveal how Venus's surface has changed between the 1990s and 2030s, as well as changes that occur during the missions.

ESA's Anne Grete Straume-Lindner, EnVision Project Scientist, highlights why the tools and new radar data will be so valuable for science: "They will help to answer key questions, namely why Venus is so different to Earth, how the surface of Venus has evolved over time, and whether there is any geological activity on the planet today."

Philippa explains that: "This project kicks off an eight-year programme of research, so we are extremely happy and grateful for the unique opportunity that ESA Discovery provides."