Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Volcanic Venus? New insights from vintage data

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Is Venus hiding volcanic secrets beneath its shroud of clouds? Robbie Herrick and Scott Hensley, the minds behind a new paper on recent potential volcanic activity on Venus, join Planetary Radio to discuss their discovery and what it means for the future of Venusian exploration. Then we turn to the night sky with our resident stargazer, Bruce Betts, for What's Up and our space trivia contest. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2023-volcanic-venusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A volcanic discovery sheds light on the mysteries of Venus, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Is Venus hiding volcanic secrets beneath its shroud of clouds? Robbie Herrick and Scott Hensley, the minds behind a new paper on recent potential volcanic activity on Venus, join us to discuss their discovery. Then we turn to the night sky with our resident stargazer, Bruce Betts, as he brings us the latest celestial updates and tests your space knowledge in our ever-popular space trivia contest.

We have some exciting news from the world of space exploration. A recent analysis of a small sample from asteroid Ryugu, which was brought back to Earth by Japan's Hayabusa 2 mission in 2020, has revealed the presence of uracil, one of the four essential building blocks of RNA. The sample also contains complex organic molecules that are crucial for life as we understand it. This new data puts us closer to understanding the potential role that asteroids may have played in the origins of life on our planet. We'll learn even more later this year with the return of NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is currently en route back to Earth from another asteroid carrying even more samples. The James Webb Space Telescope has made a really cool observation while studying the atmosphere of an exoplanet located 40 light-years away from Earth.

This intriguing planet, known as VHS 1256 b, orbits not one, but two stars. It orbits about four times further out from its stars than Pluto orbits around our Sun. JWST detected an array of molecules in this planet's atmosphere, including silicate dust grains, water, methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. This discovery marks the largest number of molecules ever identified simultaneously on a planet outside of our solar system. It's an extraordinary achievement that really underscores the potential of JWST to revolutionize our understanding of distant worlds. A recent study has created a detailed map of the water distribution near the lunar South Pole,

thanks to data from the now-retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA mission. RIP SOFIA. Researchers have discovered that most of the water around the moon's south pole exists as ice, hiding in the shadows of craters where temperatures are even colder than the average lows on the lunar nightside. It's going to get really interesting when the next generation of upcoming lunar rovers begins exploring that region in earnest. And if you're as excited about humans returning to the Moon as we are, you'll be thrilled to hear that the Artemis II rocket is making significant progress. Teams at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans have successfully integrated the major structures of the Space Launch System rocket's core stage for the upcoming Artemis II

mission. Scheduled for November 2024, Artemis II will send four astronauts on a journey around the Moon. This mission is a precursor to the next series of crewed moon landings. I know I've said this before, but I'm so excited that humans are returning to the Moon in my lifetime. You can learn more about these and other stories in the March 24th edition of our weekly newsletter, The Downlink. Read it or subscribe to have it sent to your inbox for free every Friday at planetary.org.

We have a truly fascinating interview lined up for you as we explore the recent discovery of potential signs of active volcanism on Venus. If confirmed, this finding supports long-held suspicions that the volcanic activity on our neighboring planet is still ongoing today. Venus is about 80% covered in volcanic rock and bears the scars of past eruptions, so it wouldn't be too surprising. The evidence stems from data collected by NASA's Magellan spacecraft, the last NASA mission to visit that world. It orbited Venus from 1990 to 1994. Two radar images captured in 1991, just eight months apart, show a volcanic vent transforming from a circular depression into a larger kidney shape, a change that researchers interpret as a sign of active volcanism. Our guests this week, Drs. Robbie Herrick and Scott Hensley, recently published these findings in the Journal of Science in a paper called Surface Changes Observed on a Venusian Volcano During the

Magellan Mission. They join us this week to delve into the implications of this finding as scientists continue to unravel the mystery of how Venus transformed from a potentially habitable world into the inhospitable hellscape we see today. Robbie Herrick is a research professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in, you guessed it, Fairbanks, Alaska, USA. With a keen focus on planetary science, Robbie has dedicated his career to studying the geological processes shaping various celestial bodies, including the mysterious planet of Venus. processes shaping various celestial bodies, including the mysterious planet of Venus.

Our other guest, Scott Hensley, is a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. His impressive background in radar remote sensing and a deep understanding of Earth and planetary sciences made him an excellent collaborator on this paper. Both Robbie and Scott have been crucial to past and future missions of Venus, including NASA's Magellan spacecraft. Hi, Robbie and Scott. Thanks for joining me on Planetary Radio. Thank you for having us. Nice to be here. So you've just released a new paper that's about surface changes on Venus, and it's gotten a lot of attention among the planetary science community. Even our guest last week, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who is the PI for the Psyche mission, brought up this research

because she was so excited about it. So what has your experience been like since this finding was released to the world? Sure. I thought it was a pretty important result and that it would get some press. I've kind of been overwhelmed with how widespread the coverage is and trying to soak in my 15 minutes of fame, so to speak. And it's been pretty thrilling. I get to do interviews live on TV and radio around the world. And I'm glad that there's renewing some excitement about Venus. Of course, there was a lot of excitement when these upcoming missions were selected a year or so ago as well. How about you, Scott? What's the last week been like? It's been very nice to see all the interest in the result, first of all.

And that's both from professional colleagues and from the general public alike. It's been really great to hear the excitement overall in the community. It's been really great for me as being a member of both two of the upcoming Venus missions to see them being brought back to the forefront again and the excitement about people going back to Venus. It's been really great on all fronts in terms of the interest in the result itself and in the broader implications for Venus exploration. What got you both into Venusian exploration? Of all the planets in the solar system, why Venus? Well, for me, it was the first thing I worked on at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I was a mathematician by training in school. I didn't have the same sort of pedigree that Robbie had.

And my first planetary mission at JPL was Magellan. And I've been a lifelong aficionado since that very first introduction to Venus. So I'm a radar scientist in terms of the things I've done mostly professionally and being able to apply radar to Venus. It's the ideal planet for radar exploration, so to speak. And I've been excited about it ever since. For me, I'd always had an interest in the space program until I was 10 years old. My father had worked for one of the contractors on the Apollo missions. You know, an interest in the space program had always been part of family life. My degrees were in physics and geophysics in Texas. I was getting a master's degree at night and cold called the place I later ended up working, the Lunar and Planetary

Institute, which is outside of Houston, and asked if somebody could give me a master's thesis topic that was in planetary science. And so I started my career working with Pioneer Venus gravity and topography data. From there, I decided to get a PhD, and I just happened to end up working for one of the co-investigators on the Magellan mission. And that's how I became an expert in Venus science. And now I can tell you all the reasons why Venus is way better than all the other bodies in the solar system, etc. And I'm excited to hear it. You know, a lot of these planets get a lot of love, and there have been many missions to Venus. But, you know, that planet is really tricky.

It's hiding a lot of secrets, and there's so much that we just do not know. And, Scott, you know, we've observed volcanic structures on the surface of Venus in the past, and it's pretty clear that the surface is relatively young. And we've even seen some evidence from orbiters like Venus Express and Akatsuki that maybe there's some evidence in the atmosphere of current volcanic activity. But in the context of all of that, why is your discovery so exciting? Well, as you said, there's been some evidence and indications that Venus is still active, but they're indirect. So they're ones that depend

upon chemical reactions in the atmosphere. Usually there are multiple pathways that similar chemical reactions can occur. One of them would indicate volcanism. Other pathways would indicate something else. There have been thermal anomalies on the surface again, but some of these things, how recent they were is not as clear as with our result. Our result is a visual indication of something of actually changing on the surface. And we can actually say within an eighth month period, exactly when it occurred 30 years ago. So it is really the smoking gun evidence of activity on the surface. Or the other ones were indications this is not just an indication, it is there is activity on Venus right now. Which is so exciting. I mean, if that planet is currently volcanically active, that could have a huge bearing on

how we feel about that planet and how it's changed over time. People have been really curious about Venus for ages, but it continues to make our life really hard as we try to research it. There's so many secrets we can't get to. Why is Venus such a challenging place to research? And why is there so much disagreement and predictions on volcanic activity on this planet? It's particularly challenging to study from the surface simply because the temperature is, I think, around 850 Fahrenheit, 450 C. The former

Soviet Union landed a handful of landers, which lasted a maximum of a couple of hours. And even then, it's still quite difficult to do things. And so what that has meant is that the science that has been able to be done from the surface is very limited because of your time limit. And not only is it an issue of the time on your surface, but the nature of the conditions are such that even if you can deal with keeping your instruments cool or functioning, there's also the issue of the power source and that if you're trying to do things right now,

we don't have a setup where you could use solar power from the surface and there's a whole other set of issues trying to use something like nuclear power. And so even if you can get things to survive, you're still going to end up battery limited on doing things on the surface. From orbit, synthetic aperture radar can see through the clouds without a problem. And so that's a great tool. A whole bunch of other stuff has a lot of problems seeing through the atmosphere. You know, if you look at Venus through a telescope, it looks like a fairly featureless yellow blob. And if you fly right and put yourself right in orbit around it, it will still look like a featureless yellow blob,

right, and visible light. And then even in kind of shorter wavelengths than radar where you can partially see through the clouds that very dense atmosphere is refracting a lot of the light and dispersing it. And so even though, for instance, there's a window where you can see through the atmosphere in the infrared, that scattering of light by the dense atmosphere makes the resolution that you can get very low. You do have some options for, say, floating around in the clouds at maybe 30 or 40 kilometers upwards, other than having sulfuric acid in the atmosphere, which is not too terribly difficult to deal with. But getting a balloon into the clouds is still a major challenge. So that makes the challenges pretty acute in terms of getting there. What Magellan revealed in very short terms is that

Venus, and it should be this way, Venus, because it's roughly the same size as Earth, it has a similar amount of diversity in terms of the volcanic and tectonic structures that you see. So much more so than, say, Mars or the moon. So there are true mountain ranges on the surface of Venus. There's a huge variety of volcanic landforms. There's gigantic rift systems, plenty of evidence of things erupting and moving around on the surface. But we don't see things like the organized system of mid-ocean ridges that we have on Earth. There might be a few things that look like arcs of subduction zones. And we also don't see something like on Earth where you can take high-standing landforms and piece them back together, like say Africa and South America, and get the feeling that you have clear evidence that things have moved hundreds or thousands of

kilometers around. So Venus is very complicated tectonically and volcanically, but it doesn't seem to currently have plate tectonics. And so what it has instead now and in the past, there's been a wide variety of kind of big picture scenarios that have been put forth to try and explain what we're seeing now. Some of those scenarios involve Venus being remarkably Earth-like through most of its history and then changing dramatically to the point where there's some people that think Venus had plate tectonics and had a habitable atmosphere until the last billion years ago. But there's other ideas in terms of one of the issues is that all of the things we associate with plate tectonics are really about a planet that is hotter than outer space cooling off. When you come up with these scenarios, there are flavors where Venus is comparably active to Earth now and backwards in time, but it's just doing things differently. to get similar overall levels of heat coming out on Venus, just like the Earth.

What you do is you dramatically fluctuate up and down the volcanic and tectonic activity so that right now you end up with a Venus that is remarkably less active than Earth, but you balance that by having it way more active at some time in the past, and you cycle through that. occur on Venus and that Venus is volcanically active in some sense. But how often those eruptions take place could be on timescales of every few months, every few years, or every 10,000 years. And we didn't really, there were ideas that you could make any of those options fit with what we had before. But now, of course, there's a data set of one, right? So there's the possibility we might have found the only thing that's happened on Venus in the last million years, and we just got lucky. But realistically, I think this brings Venus into a comparable level of volcanic activity to at least Earth's big basaltic shield volcanoes like Iceland, Hawaii, the Canary Islands, that sort of thing.

You pointed this out, but Venus might have changed dramatically over time. But Venus might have changed dramatically over time. So, Scott, why is it that understanding volcanism on Venus can tell us more about how the planet has changed over time? What makes us think that volcanism could have played a serious role in changing Venus from this potentially habitable world into this kind of lead-melting, face-melting hellscape it is now? First of all, I mean, all planets evolve over time. And for a planet this size, we always expect volcanism to play a role of one form or another. It's the question of how it's structured. And I think Robbie went into great length in terms of how volcanism may be structured as a function of time. Is it organized around plate tectonics? Is it organized as intense periods of activity followed by very quiescent periods? It's the spatial and temporal organization of the volcanism that's really in question,

not that volcanism would be involved at all. And so what we've seen on the surface of Venus, of course, is that it is extremely volcanically active or has been in the past and influenced a lot of the evolution of the planet. The question is then which one of these theories that has been put forward really best represents how that evolution occurred and in what time frame it did. Maybe I give a little bit of background. How people determine the ages of surface and when things occur is crater counting, basically looking at the size and distribution of impact craters on the surface. Unfortunately for Venus, we have what's called basically a uniform distribution. So unlike places on the moon or Mars, we can't tell relative ages of elements very well on the surface of Venus.

So we don't have one of our great key indicators of time or how things evolved in time. So that's one of the things that a lot of these theories still open on the table. And one of the things we might hope with these newer missions, with a better resolution and additional tools that they bring to the table, that we might get some better idea on the relative chronology. And that will maybe help us separate some of how Venus evolved over time, questions answered. And don't you love that when something just throws you for a loop? That tells us that there's some interesting physics going on there that could tell us a lot about planets in our solar system, but maybe even beyond exoplanets as well.

That's certainly the case. And it's one of the things that excites the community is what are the broader implications. Laboratory we have in our solar system is Venus, the Earth, Mars, and the Moon. So we definitely have to understand that first before we have a chance of really understanding the broader implication of what's happening with rocky body evolution around the galaxy. This research just kind of goes to show that past spacecraft like Magellan still have a lot to teach us about our solar system. But as you said, Robbie, you know, trying to find a feature like this on Venus is like

looking for a needle in a haystack. So how did you go about narrowing down your search for features like this? To give you a little bit of background, Magellan passed over every place on the surface of Venus during its imaging portion of its mission three times. But while it was doing that, the spacecraft was degrading. So the area that it actually imaged the second time around, it got about 35% of the planet or so, and then about 15% the third time around. And each of those was done with a, it wasn't designed to look for changes. It was done with a different imaging geometry. What I did in the search was I kind of had a

What I did in the search was I kind of had a list compiled from various sources of, you know, top 50 prospects for change during the Magellan mission. Just started going through there. In terms of looking for changes with time, some of that repeat imaging is a lot easier to work with than others. And sort of like the old story about the guy searching for his keys under a street lamp because that's where the light was good. I started in this one area that wasn't in my top 50 prospects, but it was the one area on Venus where two images were taken separated in time with the exact same viewing geometry. And then I moved on from there to the prospects that were in the easier to work with data where I actually found something was in this area called Atla Regio, narrowed in on

the place where there are the two of the largest volcano on the planet in terms of height and kind of size. And the number one place where you would expect to find a change is where we found a change. But it wasn't the first place I looked because it was somewhere where the images were particularly challenging to work with in terms of looking for changes. So that's kind of how things went overall. And like any funded scientist, once I found something, I stopped and wrote the paper, right? So there's a lot of other areas that still could be looked at and maybe have something found. But you bring up a really interesting topic,

which is that as Magellan was going around this planet, it's taking images, but the viewing angle is very different as it's going around, which complicates this process. And Scott, you were instrumental in taking this data and then figuring out how to glean information about it based on its different angles.

So can you tell us a little bit about that process and what you did to make this data make more sense? Robbie sent me the imagery in an email saying, look, Scott, I think I found change on the surface of Venus. And I was cautious about that because people had sent me things like this in the past. And every single time I was able to prove that there was nothing that changed.

It was really just an imaging geometry difference from the way the sensor collected the data. and every single time I was able to prove that there was nothing that changed. It was really just an imaging geometry difference from the way the sensor collected the data. But when I looked at Robbie's stuff, I was cautiously optimistic right away that he really found something. But I really wanted to make sure that this couldn't be confused with just, we just looked at this from two different perspectives and it just looked like something changed and something really did not. So what I did is I used some knowledge about how radar really works. In one of the images, we could get a pretty good idea of the shape that was on the surface. And we know what vents look like generally, so we can figure out basically what the topographic profile looked like. And with those two pieces of information and knowing which direction the radar was looking at the data, it's possible to simulate what the images should look like.

And so what we were able to do then is we took the two different imaging geometries plus our assumed shape of the crater, and then we made simulated images that we could then compare to the real images. shape of the crater and then we made simulated look images that we could then compare to the real images and we did lots of different variations of the crater shape until we found things that matched the data there was another event that was nearby that did we didn't think did change at all and we could match that up on both images very very nicely but we there's nothing that we could do that would match up the images the first time and the second time for the vent that changed. Its shape was different. It was no longer round. It was kidney-shaped. The way the backscatter, how bright it looked inside the vent was totally different than the

models. So nothing looked right. So that gave us a lot of confidence that indeed the vent had really changed and we really found, or Robbie's keen eye had really detected something that had changed on the surface. There are many different processes that can change the surface of a planet, but why is it that this specifically suggests volcanic activity? Morphologically, it's clearly a vent, although neither Scott and I are what I would say true volcanologists. I, in particular, don't spend an enormous amount of time scr top of Matmans, which is this massive volcano that is nine kilometers high and covers an area that's over a thousand kilometers across. So it's clearly a product of lava erupting from that location. In the first image, it looks like the eruptions had ceased. So you've got sort of a circular feature with a raised rim and inside it looks like there's steep walls and a few hundred meters deep. And so that looks like what you would typically see

is an evacuated vent where the eruptions cease, the magma that's underneath is sort of withdrawn. In the next image, to me, it looks very similar. Typical basalt shield volcanoes where then you get a new influx of magma and in the place where you erupted before something happens, you sort of subsume part of this vent structure and you end up with a lava lake. We're careful in the paper, though, to put some caveats on there because through modeling, we can demonstrate that the second image is not the same thing as the first image, is different, and not just attributable to viewing geometry. We do not, however, have enough information to definitively get the shape before and after, especially in a volumetric sense.

And so we can't rule out the possibility that this first event underwent some really bizarre, spontaneous collapse that resulted in the second image. But on Earth, we have zero examples of a multi-kilometer change in a feature on top of a big volcano where there's a change, but no eruption takes place anywhere. I feel quite confident that there wasn't a volcanic eruption somewhere. In terms of my bets, and Scott may have a different set of bets based on his experience, but in my bet, have a different set of bets based on his experience. But in my bet, there's a 99.9% chance that some sort of volcanic eruption took place in that location, but that the things downhill are new flows. I don't know. You could ask Scott what his bets are, but that's my set

of betting on what we found. I'm highly confident that there was probably some sort of volcanic origin for the change on the vent or the caldera. I'm less confident about the new flow. I lean more toward it could very well just be a difference in the scattering geometry on that particular area. I can't rule it out one way or the other. That one is one I just didn't have as strong a feeling for as Robbie did. But the vent itself, we're both pretty confident about that one. I think the new missions that we've been talking about will go a long way to helping us understand what's really happening on the vent itself and on that potential

new flow. We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Scott Hensley and Robbie Herrick after this short message. Hi, it's Casey Dreyer. I'm the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. And I just want to take a moment to thank you for being part of the world's largest and most influential nonprofit space organization. Together, we are on a remarkable journey to make a better future for humankind through space science and exploration.

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I'll put this question to you, Scott. There are a lot of missions going to Venus right now. I'll put this question to you, Scott. There are a lot of missions going to Venus right now. You know, we've got the Indian Space Research Organization, the European Space Agency, NASA, all of them sending basically a fleet to Venus. We even have private missions on the way to Venus right now. So this finding comes at a really opportune time. Would you have any advice for the people that are planning these missions, which includes you, to take this information into account that might change the way that they design or plan these missions? Well, we should be very careful.

These missions going to Venus, some of them have some of the same instrumentation, and some of them have very different instrumentation. So the ones that have a chance of seeing the surface have radars because of the thick cloud surface. And there's four missions that I'm aware of that are thinking about having radars. There's the ESA mission, the NASA mission, the India mission, and the Chinese have also proposed a mission to go to Venus, all with synthetic aperture radars. And if you really want to look for change on the surface, the number one piece of advice that I have is you have to have similar look geometry as you can between the different observations, because that's what makes the job a lot easier. I want to emphasize how hard the job Robbie had to do was.

Looking for changes in the data where it's coming from these different viewing geometries from opposite look directions the way we did, is something that only can be done by a human. We can't even train a computer algorithm to do this reliably. And a lot of the image looks different. There were a lot of things that looked different in that image, but only the one thing really changed. So in order for this process to potentially be automated, and so we can really look at the whole surface of Venus, you really want to change the sensor viewing geometry so that it's consistently the same.

And then you have a chance to automate that process and look at wide areas of Venus and look for changes in a systematic way. We did share in the last show that the recent presidential budget request for NASA has had some impacts on the Veritas mission, which is going to Venus. And it's currently on an indefinite hold due to budget and workforce issues. So if this mission did get the funding it needed, how would it help further our understanding of volcanism on Venus? First of all, I've been working on the design of this mission for a decade, more than a decade. And so, of course, I'm disappointed that we're not flying to Venus on our original schedule. But we're still working with NASA to try to get the schedule to get as early as possible launch as we can. We're scientists. I try to be eternally optimistic about the chances of getting there and getting the data that we really need. Now, VERITAS is going to do something that is really desperately needed in terms of understanding of volcanism

and a lot of other geophysical processes on the surface. And that is it's going to make a high-resolution topographic map of Venus. So right now, the topography, the resolution we have is about 20 kilometers, meaning we have an elevation measurement spaced every 20 kilometers on the surface. Compared to like Earth maps with topography where we have an elevation measurement spaced every 20 kilometers on the surface, compared to like Earth maps with topography where we have an elevation measurement, say, every 10 or 20 meters on the surface. On VERITAS, we will make a map that has a resolution of 250 meters with really good

height accuracy, about five meters. And that's going to be a game changer for understanding the geophysical processes on the surface. game changer for understanding the geophysical processes on the surface. That coupled with high resolution imagery of either 30 meters for globally or 15 meters for about 25% of the surface, those two things are dramatically going to change our understanding of a lot of processes on the surface and allow us to look for changes at a much smaller scale than we could with Magellan. You have to remember a single pixel in the Magellan images is as big as a football field. So it's a pretty large area.

So getting down to these smaller things will help us understand processes at all sorts of scales going on on the surface. With both the Veritas and the Envision missions, any mission that flies a synthetic aperture radar in the future will have the ability to try and look backward from Magellan and see changes over at least a three-decade, maybe four-decade interval. But the limiting factor in terms of the scale of the changes is going to be the resolution and the Magellan data. Veritas is also planning to do something

called repeat pass interferometry, which is a technique that's used on the Earth all the time to map centimeter scale changes from volcanoes, earthquakes, and other geophysical processes on the surface. Having this great observation that was made here, this gives us one target where we won't be able to do that for a very large fraction of the surface with the VERITAS mission, but we will, having a target in mind where we can go and do this, it would really help us. And if we can make an observation where there's these changes going on, it's like an X-ray. It's telling us what's going on beneath the surface. So it provides us an idea of what the Venus volcanic plumbing is really like.

And that's been my area of research for most of my career. And I would be really excited to go back and get repeat pass imagery over this particular event to see if we could see something that's going on in terms of the volcanic plumbing on Venus. Honestly, planets like Mars get so much love. They have so many missions going there. And I am so ready for the decade of Venus. There's so much that we don't understand and whether or not these timings all fall out just the way we want them to, just the fact that there's a renewed interest in this planet just really makes me happy and I can't wait to see what happens next. So what's coming next for your team? I mean, you kind of hinted at the fact that you found your result and you immediately went to go publish that,

but what's coming up next? Is there more research to be had on the subject that you found your result and you immediately went to go publish that. But what's coming up next? Is there more research to be had on the subject for you guys? Both Scott and I are involved with both Envision and Veritas. And even with the delay at Veritas, both of those missions are doing a lot of forward planning to get ready for eventual data collection. to get ready for eventual data collection. Right now, one of the things coming up for VERITAS is to do airborne imaging of Venus analog areas on the Earth to help us better interpret the structures

that we will be seeing under the particular viewing geometry of VERITAS. Yeah, so this is one of those experiments. This is gonna be done, our first experiment is going to be done in Iceland starting this summer. This is one of the things where our international collaborations really pay off. The German Space Agency is operating this airborne radar that we plan to use. And it actually has the two frequencies, the Magellan frequency and the Veritas frequency,

basically, that it can collect simultaneously. So this will allow us to collect data on Venus-like targets with both of the wavelengths or the frequencies that the two radars operated at and allow the scientists to build this understanding of what we would expect for certain types of structures with both the two radars that will enable us to better understand the data when we finally arrive at Venus, hopefully in the not too distant future. Does that mean you both have an upcoming trip to Iceland? I think so. That's planned for this summer for me.

I am not as central to this particular Iceland campaign as Scott is. So if they need some extra warm bodies, I'll get to go to Iceland. Sounds like an excellent time. Well, it's going to be really exciting. There's a lot of things coming out about Venus and it's just going to get better. So if you ever come up with some really excellent new data on this, if you find some really cool new caldera or vent out there, please let me know because I would love to share it with everyone. I'd be happy to do so, Sarah. Well, thank you both so much for joining me on the show. And I think you've blown a lot of people's minds with this one. So we've all got a lot to look forward to in the future. And thanks for joining me. Thanks for having us.

You know, every so often, I like to pull up the only images ever captured from the surface of Venus, which were taken by Russia's Venera missions in the 1970s and 80s. I try to imagine what it must be like to be there in this moment. That cracked ground. The acidic yellow sky. Not to mention the catastrophic pressures and face-melting temperatures. There's so much that we don't know about that place, despite it being so close, cosmically speaking. It's exciting to think about what we might discover in the next decades

as more missions from around the world visit our planetary neighbor. And as we mentioned in the interview, NASA's upcoming VERITAS mission to Venus is currently on hold and needs our advocacy. No matter where you live, you can help by sharing the hashtag Save Veritas on your social media channels. If you live in the United States, we've created an easy form that lets you contact your representatives in Congress to support the mission in just a couple of minutes.

Visit planetary.org slash action and click on Save the Veritas Mission to Venus. With our powers combined, we can help save Veritas. Now let's check in with Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society for What's Up. Sup, Bruce? Yes, that is the name of the segment, Sarah, although you seem to have conflated the words together. What's up? Sup. I stand by it. But, you know, I had all these grand plans to actually escape my gamer den after recovering from COVID, go outside, take a look up at Venus, you know, maybe think about volcanoes or something, and then just torrential rain. So I've not been able to go outside and see the beautiful sky in quite a while. But, you know, if I

do go out this week, hopefully it won't rain as hard. There are probably people who can see the sky. And for those people, Venus, easiest thing you can see over there in the West, super bright, looking fun, looking fabulous. If you look up high, you can see Mars. And Mars and like Orion and Taurus, Registrar Aldebaran, they've been hanging out for a few months together. Yeah, they're done. They're growing apart over the next few weeks. They're growing apart.

And as a result, Mars is dimming. No, I mean, it's related, but that's not actually why. Mars is getting farther away from the Earth, and so I've been saying it's been dimming, but it really will dim significantly. And right now, Aldebaran is brighter. This is for those who want to play with reddish stars in the sky and their brightness. Aldebaran has been the dimmer one, but now it's a little bit brighter. Mars will keep fading as it runs away. Don't worry, everyone.

It'll be back every 26 months, like clockwork, whether we want it to or not. All right. Pre-dawn. pre-dawn people, Saturn, go out there, check it out in the pre-dawn east. And back to those constellations, we're going to have Orion and the gang running away pretty soon. So check them out, getting lower in the sky, moving towards the west as the weeks go on. Yeah. It's that moment when, you know, winter up here in the north ends, spring rolls on in, and Orion just runs away.

If we move on to this week in space history, it was 1974 that Mariner 10 did its first flyby of Mercury, giving us our first spacecraft view of Mercury. And it would do a couple more flybys, and we'd image more than 50%, and then wait until 2008 for messenger to capture the rest of it. Turns out it's gray and covered in craters. Shall I move on? Let's do the thing. Random space.

Did you catch, we did that a chainsaw thing on you last week. That was super fun. That was new. That was exciting. I know. I mean, this one needs something. It was, I don't know what it was, but maybe it's because I'm going into what's kind of not a normal random space fact, but then I thought about it and it's a fact and it happened in space and it is quite random. I just thought it was a neat story, which is from an article that astronaut Tom Jones wrote interviewing Bob Stewart, the astronaut. Bob Stewart, who was the second astronaut to fly untethered in space.

So you have the iconic Bruce McCandless picture floating over the Earth in the man maneuvering unit. And we'll get back to that. Dun, dun, dun. But Bob Stewart then did the second flight. He thought, what would it be like to be the only person in the universe? So he turned himself to where he couldn't see the Earth, the Moon, or the Sun, only the blackness of space. I only lasted 15 seconds, and I thought, well, let's just turn around and make sure everything's still there.

That sounds horrifying. That sounds horrifying. As much as I want to go to space, like floating untethered in space, staring into the darkness, national flag has some representation of the Southern Cross asterism that is part of the Crux constellation. How do we do with this one? Oh, the beautiful Southern Cross. Yeah, we got a lot of answers from all over the world on this one. The dice have spoken. And Allison Benfield from Charleston, South Carolina, USA is our winner. And the answer is Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, and Brazil. So no surprise there, countries that can actually see the Southern Cross.

Oh, oh, I get it now. Yeah, but I loved actually, this made me really happy because every so often people say in the comments, like, I've never won. I wish I could win this contest. Well, Allison wrote in and said, I have terrible luck when it comes to winning this contest, and perhaps the odds will be in her favor this time. So I would like to tell you, Allison, the odds are ever in your favor, and you got it this time. The dice have spoken. Yep. That's cool. Congratulations.

And we got a lot of wonderful comments on this one i loved this this comment from joel caliputre from north middleton new jersey usa who said i wonder if penguins in antarctica would choose to put this asterism on their flag if they created a country i don't know what penguin eyes are like or if they even look up at the stars or can. I'm stuck on forming a penguin country. Anywho. Also got this really cool kind of like trivia fact. Norman Kassoon, who's a regular listener, wrote in and said, The Southern Cross has been part of Australia's First Nations cosmology for millennia.

And when European voyagers got there in the late 1500s, they took it as a sign of their divine blessing for conquest. But then even after that, it was a symbol of rebellion for the Eureka Stockade, which was part of the Eureka Rebellion. That was a series of events involving gold miners that revolted against the British administration in Victoria, Australia. gold miners that revolted against the British administration in Victoria, Australia. So like this asterism apparently has a long history in Australia of having all kinds of meaning to different movements there. It's fascinating. Strangely too, Victoria is where I saw both penguins for the first time and the Southern Cross. Whoa. Going back to flying around tetherless in space, who took the iconic picture of Bruce McCandless floating untethered over the Earth during the first flight of the man maneuvering unit? Who was the photographer?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I imagine it was someone having a deep existential crisis because that image terrifies and amazes me. Everybody out there, you have until April 5th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. And whoever wins this will be the lucky winner of another Goodnight Oppie thermal mug. We keep getting people who want another chance to win that. So we'll be giving out another Goodnight Oppie thermal mug. And of course, Goodnight Oppie is a lovely documentary about the opportunity rover on mars so here's your chance fam we got you cool all right everybody go out there look up the night

sky and think about looking out into the night sky and try not to have an existential crisis thank you and good night we've reached the end of this week's episode of planetary radio but we'll be back next Thank you and good night. We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week to celebrate two years of the Emirates Hope mission to Mars with Mohsen El-Awadhi, Director of the Space Missions Department of the UAE Space Agency. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our Venusian Volcano Loving members. You can join us as we continue to puzzle over Venus's strange history at planetary.org.

Mark Hilverda and Ray Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. And until next week, Ad Astra.