Venus from Ground Based radar and other Options

[belleraphon1]

Image Release: Venus, If You Will, as Seen in Radar with the GBT
https://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/venus-surface-gbt

Impressive.

May be awhile before we return to Venus. Perhaps we need a ground based forum for the time being.

Craig

[Phil Stooke]

A third transmitter would help, as suggested, but also the same method applied at a different inferior conjunction will have the Doppler equator (the dark band) in a different location, and all the reflection effects correspondingly moved. By comparing images of different dates the ambiguity can be removed.

There is a long history of radar imaging of Venus, going back 50 years. This is by far the best single image - the bistatic method works really well - but there are many others made monostatically at Goldstone and Arecibo. The brief comments about past work in the press release don't do the subject justice. Anyhoo... there is a good basis for comparison to look for fresh lava flows or other changes. Incidentally, some past results were much higher resolution than this, so I would hope that the image we have is significantly downsampled from the real data.

Phil