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VERITAS: Exploring the Deep Truths of Venus to Reveal the Inner Workings of Earth’s Mysterious “Twin” - SciTechDaily

VERITAS: Exploring the Deep Truths of Venus to Reveal the Inner Workings of Earth’s Mysterious “Twin” - SciTechDaily

VERITAS: Exploring the Deep Truths of Venus to Reveal the Inner Workings of Earth’s Mysterious “Twin” - SciTechDaily
Jul 10, 2020 2 mins, 6 secs

An artist’s concept of active volcanos on Venus, depicting a subduction zone where the foreground crust plunges into the planet’s interior at the topographic trench.

This artist’s concept shows the proposed VERITAS spacecraft using its radar to produce high-resolution maps of Venus’ topographic and geologic features.

“You have these two planetary bodies — Earth and Venus — that started out nearly the same but have gone down two completely different evolutionary paths, but we don’t know why.”.

While it provided tantalizing clues about Venus’ geology, the instrumentation couldn’t provide certitude as to the origin of many of the planet’s surface features.

Proposed for a 2026 launch, VERITAS would orbit the planet and peer through the obscuring clouds with a powerful state-of-the art radar system to create 3D global maps and a near-infrared spectrometer to figure out what the surface is made of.

It would also measure the planet’s gravitational field to determine the structure of Venus’ interior.

Learning more about the geologic processes on Venus — where the warm crust is a good analogy for early Earth’s, when the plates were just beginning to form – could offer a valuable glimpse into how these processes began on Earth.

Producing high-resolution 3D topographic maps VERITAS would bring into focus structures that have previously been too small to resolve, added Stock.

VERITAS would also look for active surface faulting using something called interferometric deformation maps for the first time beyond Earth.

To determine if Venus’ tessera plateaus formed in a similar way to Earth’s continents, VERITAS would construct the first global multispectral maps of Venus’ surface composition.

“Determining whether Venus is actively undergoing volcanic activity and understanding what process is driving it is one of the really exciting questions I’d love to see answered,” said planetary scientist Jennifer Whitten, a VERITAS science team member at Tulane University in New Orleans?

In getting to know Venus’ volcanoes and the geophysical processes causing them, scientists could also gauge their impact on the planet’s climate and, perhaps, answer another key question: Does the planet’s interior still contain large quantities of water like Earth’s does?

“To unwrap the mysteries of Venus we have to look under the hood at Venus’ interior; it is the engine for global geologic and atmospheric evolution,” said Smrekar.

July 6, 2020

July 6, 2020

July 6, 2020

July 6, 2020

July 6, 2020

July 6, 2020

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