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Venus Revealed: New Telescope Peeks Beneath the Clouds
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 07:00 am ET
11 May 2001
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Can run anytime A new radio telescope has combined with another to bounce radar pulses off the surface of Venus, revealing a mountain there taller than Mount Everest and showing off the capabilities of a new observational program.The new image of the towering peak, called Maxwell Montes, along with a view of a small asteroid, represent a coming out party for the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The 330-foot- (100-meter-) wide dish gathered data in tandem with the recently upgraded Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. Venus hides its wonders behind a constant cloud cover. But radar waves can penetrate the clouds, bouncing off the surface and returning to Earth after a five-minute round trip. NASA's Magellan spacecraft used radar a decade ago to probe beneath Venus' cloud cover, revealing and mapping the surface in detail. The new twin-telescope technique, the first since Magellan to look at large areas of the planet's surface, has the ability to resolve surface features down to about 1 kilometer (0.62 mile). But because two telescopes were used, the radar echoes can be combined to measure altitudes of some of our sister planet's mountain ranges with much better detail than Magellan, said researchers associated with the new project.Slowly rotating asteroid The radio telescopes also produced an image of Asteroid 2001 EC16, which is just 500 feet (150 meters) across. The view was taken March 26 when the asteroid was about eight times the distance of the Moon from Earth. The asteroid had only been discovered 11 days earlier, by another group of researchers. It was resolved down to 50 feet (15 meters) and found to be irregularly shaped, like many asteroids. But this one rotates about once every 200 hours -- one of the slowest rotation rates measured so far for these objects. Scientists expect the pair of radio telescopes will help to quickly study some of the dozens of asteroids that are found every month. "Having a really big telescope like the new Green Bank Telescope to receive the radar echoes from small asteroids that are really close to the Earth and from very distant objects like Titan, the large moon of Saturn, will be a real boon to radar studies of the solar system." said Cornell University professor Donald Campbell. Campbell led the research team, which also included Jean-Luc Margot of Caltech, Lynn Carter of Cornell and Bruce Campbell of the Smithsonian Institution. The Green Bank Telescope is operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Click here for more news and information about our solar system.
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