NASA captures stunning, first of a kind images of Venus' surface

By Ben Turner published about 5 hours ago

The images could hold clues into Venus' mysterious past



NASA captured the images during the fourth flyby of the Parker Solar Probe. (Image credit: NASA/APL/NRL)

Stunning images snapped by NASA's Parker Solar Probe have given the very first visible light glimpse of Venus' red-hot surface, revealing continents, plains and plateaus on the inhospitable volcanic world.

Peering beneath the thick and toxic Venusian clouds with the Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument, NASA scientists spotted a bevy of geological features lit up in the faint glow of Venus' nightside surface, alongside a luminescent halo of oxygen in the planet's atmosphere.

The groundbreaking images, taken during the Parker Solar Probe's fourth flyby of Venus on the way to the sun, will give scientists valuable insights into the scorching planet's geology and minerals, and they could reveal more about how Venus became so inhospitable while life on Earth flourished. NASA scientists published their analysis of the images Feb. 9 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.



A side by side comparison of Venus's surface as viewed by the Parker Solar Probe (left) and the Magellan mission (right). The surface features in both images match. (Image credit: NASA/APL/NRL (left), Magellan Team/JPL/USGS (right))

"Venus is the third brightest thing in the sky, but until recently we have not had much information on what the surface looked like because our view of it is blocked by a thick atmosphere," study lead author Brian Wood, a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "Now, we finally are seeing the surface in visible wavelengths for the first time from space."

More:
https://www.livescience.com/first-visible-light-venus-images?utm_source=notification