Astronomy Picture Of The Day: Meet Venus

 

#NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα, #Venus

Black Hole

@konstructivizm

In the heat of the moment Meet Venus: Earth’s evil twin that never learned to cool down. This isn’t a photo; it’s a radar portrait stitched together over decades and finished in cinematic style by the Magellan mission between 1990 and 1994. For the first time in history, we ripped away the planet’s blinding cloud veil and saw every square inch of its scorched skin.The colors are altitude in disguise: emerald plains, copper-bronze lava rivers frozen mid-flow, deep sapphire lows along the poles. More than 85 % of the surface is buried under volcanic floods so ancient they could have watched the dinosaurs come and go from next door. There’s no water, no wind worth mentioning, no erosion to speak of; features here refuse to die, lounging around for hundreds of millions of years like they’ve got all eternity.Magellan mapped it all, discovered thousands of volcanoes, proved Venus once had a pulse… and then, in October 1994, got the most metal retirement plan ever: “Dive.” It plunged into the crushing, 475 °C atmosphere, radioing home until the very end, before burning up in a final blaze of glory over the hellscape it had just revealed to humanity.Look closely and you’ll see a world forged from molten emerald and bronze. Swirling across the green “ocean” are rivers of solidified lava, and scattered among them, ancient craters, scars from a time when asteroids still dropped by uninvited. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS