Magellan: Venus False-Color Terrain
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- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright
- View full credits
This animation is a brief tour of the global terrain of the planet Venus as revealed by radar onboard the Magellan spacecraft. The height of the terrain is color-coded, with blues and greens representing low altitudes and reds representing high altitudes. Highlighted are two large "continents," or highlands, Aphrodite Terra and Ishtar Terra; the Maxwell Montes mountain range; and Maat Mons, a large, currently dormant volcano.
Magellan arrived at Venus in August of 1990 and spent four years there collecting data. The elevation map used here was created with data collected during the first mapping cycle. Many of the coverage gaps, represented here by black pixels, were filled in during later mapping cycles.
An animation highlighting major features of the surface of Venus.
This video is also available on our YouTube channel.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.The clouds are an altered version of an image by David Seal, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.
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Animator
- Ernie Wright (USRA) [Lead]
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Scientist
- James Garvin (NASA, Chief Scientist Goddard)
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Producer
- Andrew Freeberg (NASA/GSFC)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
Magellan GSDR (A.K.A. Global Slope) (Collected with the Radar sensor)
Magellan GTDR (A.K.A. Global Topography) (Collected with the Radar sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.