Tuesday, October 21, 2014

ScienceDaily: Dark Matter News

ScienceDaily: Dark Matter News


Heavy metal frost? A new look at a Venusian mystery

Posted: 20 Oct 2014 10:39 AM PDT

Venus is hiding something beneath its brilliant shroud of clouds: a first order mystery about the planet that researchers may be a little closer to solving because of a new re-analysis of twenty-year-old spacecraft data. Venus's surface can't be seen from orbit in visible light because of the planet's hot, dense, cloudy atmosphere. Instead, radar has been used by spacecraft to penetrate the clouds and map out the surface – both by reflecting radar off the surface to measure elevation and by looking at the radio emissions of the hot surface. The last spacecraft to map Venus in this way was Magellan, two decades ago.

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