Connect with us

Space

Venus really is volcanically active, new study shows

Published

on

Venus is almost the same size, mass and density as Earth. So it should be generating heat in its interior (by the decay of radioactive elements) at much the same rate as the Earth does. On Earth, one of the main ways in which this heat leaks out is via volcanic eruptions. During an average year, at least 50 volcanoes erupt.

But despite decades of looking, we’ve not seen clear signs of volcanic eruptions on Venus – until now. A new study by geophysicist Robert Herrick of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, which he reported this week at the Lunar & Planetary Science Conference in Houston and published in the journal Science, has at last caught one of the planet’s volcanoes in the act.

It’s not straightforward to study Venus’s surface because it has a dense atmosphere including an unbroken cloud layer at a height of 45-65km that is opaque to most wavelengths of radiation, including visible light.

The only way to get a detailed view of the ground from above the clouds is by radar directed downward from an orbiting spacecraft.

A technique known as aperture synthesis is used to build up an image of the surface. This combines the varying strength of the radar echos bounced back from the ground – including the time delay between transmission and receipt, plus slight shifts in frequency corresponding to whether the spacecraft is getting closer to or further from the origin of a particular echo.

The resulting image looks rather like a black and white photograph, except that the brighter areas usually correspond to rougher surfaces and the darker areas to smoother surfaces.

Nasa’s Magellan probe orbited Venus from August 1990 to October 1994 and used this sort of radar technique to map the planet’s surface with a spatial resolution of about a hundred metres at best.

It showed that over 80% of the surface is covered by lava flows, but just how recently the youngest of them were erupted, and whether any eruptions continue today, remained a mystery for the next three decades.

There have been various hints of activity provided by spacecraft peering into, and sometimes through, the clouds – suggesting that the rocks there are so young that their minerals have not yet been altered by reaction with the acidic atmosphere and so are freshly erupted lava.

Thermal anomalies that could correspond to active lava flows have also been detected, as have temporary local hiccups in the atmospheric sulphur dioxide concentration – another potential sign of volcanic eruptions. But none of these was fully convincing.

Volcanic vent spotted

The new study now seems to have settled the matter, by revealing changes on the surface that really have to be a result of volcanic activity. The authors spent hundreds of hours comparing Magellan radar images of parts of Venus that had been imaged more than once to look for new or changed features on the surface.

They concentrated on the most promising volcanic regions, and eventually spotted an example where details on an image recorded in October 1991 are different to those on an image from February of the same year. The changes they saw are best explained by a volcanic eruption within that time window.

Using radar images to verify surface changes is tricky because the appearance of even an unchanging surface can differ according to surface slopes and direction of view. However, the researchers performed simulations to verify that the observed changes could not result from these things.

The paired images show an initially near circular volcanic crater about 1.5km across that between February and October doubled in size by extending eastwards. It also became shallower, and the authors suggest that the crater is a volcanic vent that partially collapsed and was largely filled by fresh lava during October.

There are probably also new lava flows extending several kilometres down slope, northwards of the crater, which either flooded over the crater rim or leaked out of an associated fissure. The active crater sits high on Maat Mons, one of Venus’s largest volcanoes whose summit is 5km above the surrounding plains.

Future missions

Most planetary scientists already expected Venus to be volcanically active. The focus of attention will now surely turn to how often, and at how many sites, are eruptions occurring on Venus.

The biggest surprise in all this is that it took so long for someone to find the evidence for surface changes that had been lurking in the Magellan data for 30 years.

The likelihood of finding and studying ongoing volcanism is one of the main drivers for Nasa’s Veritas mission and Esa’s EnVision mission (both approved in 2021). Each will carry a better imaging radar than Magellan.

EnVision is intended to reach its orbit about Venus in 2034. Originally Veritas should have been there several years beforehand, but there have been delays to the schedule.

With Nasa’s DaVinci mission likely to arrive year or two ahead of them, providing optical images from below the clouds during its descent, we are in for an exciting time about ten years from now.

David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue Reading

Space

NASA Drops Bombshell; Admits Moon Landings Were Faked

Published

on

By


Did you know NASA has finally revealed the truth about the fake moon landings?

Mainstream media barely reported on the astonishing revelations, so most people remain none the wiser about what NASA has admitted in the last 12 months. 

The truth of the matter is NASA has all but admitted the landings were fake, and anybody who works in the space industry or has any knowledge about rocket science has quietly accepted that the whole thing was a charade. So why the hell is nobody talking about this?

We literally didn’t go to the moon in 1969 and, to this day, no human being — American, Russian, Chinese or ancient Egyptian — has been past lower earth orbit which is about 1000 miles above sea level.

That’s right, no human being has ever been higher than 1000 miles above sea level… Except for those times we “went to the moon” which is 240,000 miles away. And guess what, we did that in 1969! When a computer with the computing power of a TI-89 graphing calculator was the size of a house. We didn’t even have the technology for VCRs yet. We didn’t even have microwaves.

Fast forward to today, over 50 years later, when an iPhone 12 has more computing power than every single computer on Earth in 1969 COMBINED.

And yet…. NASA claims that we can’t go back to the moon because we have “lost the technology” to go to the moon. Apparently it was “destroyed” but they won’t tell us how or why. 

Hmm… Seems legit.

But it gets even worse.

Tired of people asking to analyze the original moon landing tapes, NASA had to admit they had LOST them. Then the story changed and they claimed they had TAPED OVER THE ORIGINAL MOON LANDING TAPES because of budget cuts.

Apparently they have since found the original tapes in a suburban garden shed in Las Vegas. Conveniently for NASA, they weren’t found in a Hollywood basement used by Stanley Kubrick.

Because let’s face it, how likely is it that NASA would actually tape over the original footage of mankind’s greatest achievement? Because of budget cuts, really?

And the fact that the TV broadcast, watched by hundreds of millions, was not sent directly to TV stations but was rather a projection of the broadcast off a wall which was then recorded and sent out, doesn’t sound like NASA are covering their tracks or anything.

Let’s face facts. Everything that was done 50 years ago is a thousand times cheaper and easier to do today. Are we actually expected to believe that we went to the moon in this piece of shit 50 years ago? I’ve seen homeless encampments on Skid Row that have more insulation. I’ve seen Met Gala costumes that look sturdier than that.

It’s all so implausible. Who shot the event from outside the capsule? How is the American flag waving? Why do the shadows look like they are the result of multiple light sources? Why is the letter C visible on one of the rocks? (which happens to look like a prop on a film set)?

And don’t forget about the time NASA astronaut Alan Shepard supposedly sneaked a golf club and some balls onto Apollo 14 and played golf on the moon. Hold on, how do you sneak a golf club onto a space craft when every cubic inch and ounce is accounted for?

He sneaked it up his ass, obviously.

Really, let’s think about this rationally. In 1969 we sent a tiny homeless tent covered in aluminum foil 250,000 miles away to a precise location, when even being 1/10000 of an inch off in any part of the launch would have caused the ship to miss the moon by thousands of miles…. And yet, we landed it, we played golf… And now we can’t even get humans past 1000 miles above sea level.

Perhaps the final word should go to Buzz Aldrin. According to Buzz, we didn’t go to the moon at all! But he didn’t stop there. Listen to what he says about the hundreds of millions of people around the world who were affected by the moon landing. It’s call mass formation psychosis. The elite have been using this technique to brainwash the masses since 1969.

(Article by Baxter Dmitry republished from NewsPunch.com)

Continue Reading

Space

UFO in the form of a black cube was filmed over Texas

Published

on

By

A video of a strange black object that appears to be a cube was filmed this week on Tuesday at an unspecified location in Texas, USA.

According to the unnamed author of the video, he and his wife looked up at the sky as a military plane that looked like an F-111 bomber flew west to east right over their house.

They regarded this incident as very unusual, since military aircraft had previously very rarely appeared in their area.

But they were even more confused when, literally “seconds later” after the bomber’s passage, a dark object appeared in the sky.

At first it seemed to them spherical, but then they considered that it was more like a cube. It is also possible that the object has changed its shape.

In the video, a man can be heard saying, “It’s so weird. A military plane flies by, and then THIS appears, whatever it is,” to which his wife replies, “I have no idea what it is.”

It is indicated that the man sent the video he shot to the UFO site MUFON. The eyewitness also admitted that the strange object could be something mundane, such as a baby balloon, but he thinks that this “air anomaly” emits some kind of glow, which is clearly not related to the properties of balloons.

In his opinion, this “glow” may be associated with the propulsion system of the aircraft.

Continue Reading

Trending

Generated by Feedzy