Potent telescope pair penetrates shroud of Venus

An Arecibo and Green Bank telescope image of Maxwell Montes, a mountain on Venus taller than Earth's Mount Everest

By Richard Stenger
CNN

(CNN) -- Penetrating the thick clouds of Venus, two advanced observatories on Earth have teamed up to give a close-up glimpse of the shrouded planet.

The observations, made by the two largest radio telescopes in the world, should help scientists determine whether the volcanic mountains on Venus have changed shape since a NASA orbiter mapped the planet in the early 1990s.

Underneath a bright veil of white clouds, Venus could prove as geologically active as Earth, churning and warping on the surface from volcanic processes, astronomers said.

Radar echoes picked up by the veteran Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico and a new telescope in West Virginia should provide much better precision in measuring the altitudes of the planet's mountains than did the Magellan spacecraft, which capped off a four-mission by plunging into the venusian atmosphere in 1994.

The Green Bank Telescope in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. It is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope

"Having a really big telescope like the new Green Bank Telescope will be a real boon to radar studies of the solar system," said astronomer Donald Campbell, citing numerous possible celestial subjects such as asteroids near Earth and Titan, the large moon of Saturn.

Campbell, a Cornell University researcher, is heading up the Venus survey, the first since Magellan to cover large areas of the planet's surface. It will resolve features as small as 3,000 feet (1 km).

The new detailed images were released last week by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia, which operates the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. The scientific photo shoot was the first for the new telescope, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope.

The 330-feet (100-meter) telescope collaborated for its debut with the 1,000-feet (305-meter) Arecibo observatory, the largest telescope of any kind in the world.

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Cornell University

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