The University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist has found evidence of recent volcano activity on Venus. UAF Geophysical Institute professor Robert Herrick looked over radar images that shows the surfaces of Venus taken over the span of eight months in the year 1991 using NASA’s Magellan spacecraft. They found evidence of lava flowing in a vent located that is located on Venus’s biggest volcano: Maat Mons. _
“Not only is it 9 km high It also encompasses an area of more than a thousand kilometers in size We’re actually viewing a small fraction of a huge mountain,” Herrick said.
The paper that outlined the findings has been presented during the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held next week in Texas. At a press event Wednesday afternoon, Herrick described the time-lag between the acquisition of Venus images through Magellan and the detection of active lava flows in Maat Mons. Herrick said that the ability to filter the huge amount of images collected from Magellan was initially restricted by the technology.
“The kind of analysis that led to this discovery really needed the ability to pan a few hundred gigabytes of data as well as zoom in and out,” he said.
Herrick’s coauthor, NASA’s Scott Hensley, emphasized that there is no way to figure out the geographical changes that result from lava flow.
“This remains a manual job,” he said. “So you’ll need that new technology to display things, since we aren’t able to write mathematical code that searches through every data source to find this.”
Herrick and Hensley’s study is published within the journal Science is the latest to add Venus to a list of the bodies that are in our solar system and believed as active in volcanic activity. Herrick believes that future Venus observation missions are likely to record volcanic eruptions that occurred prior to the photographs taken by Magellan more than 30 years ago.
