Despite the best efforts of scientists eager to study Earth’s sister world, U.S. efforts to send a dedicated spacecraft to Venus have languished. An imminent announcement could decide whether it will be years—or decades—before we go back
Despite the best efforts of scientists eager to study Earth’s sister world, U.S. efforts to send a dedicated spacecraft to Venus languished—until NASA made a surprising announcement
updated: Jun 02 2021, 20:28 ist
Like many kids, Sue Smrekar dreamed that she would one day voyage into space. But instead of becoming an astronaut, she ended up as a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she worked on robotic explorers of other worlds. In some sense, her interplanetary destiny seemed preordained even before she was born: her father hails from a rural community in Pennsylvania named Venus.
Fittingly, the very first mission Smrekar worked on was NASA’s ambitious (and wildly successful) Venus orbiter Magellan. Launched in 1989, Magellan was equipped with a sophisticated radar system, one that peered beneath the planet’s omnipresent clouds to map its entire surface for the first time. Smrekar recalls watching the initial radar images come in, revealing a bizarre world covered in few craters, a surfeit of volcanoes and rolling plains of frozen lava.
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