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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