Magellan EDR/RAW Data Options

[Brian Swift]

Just curious, has anyone gone spelunking in the Magellan SAR EDR (raw) dataset?

https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/magellan/edr/

Looks like a set of 9-track mag tapes were copied to CD-ROMs for preservation,
and at some point the CD files were put online in PDS.

In starting to look at it, I realized that lack of knowledge of
mag tape volume/label/file/record structure and terminology may impede
younger explorers of this dataset.

[Antdoghalo]

A lot of the USGS products with Venus are a mess. From reprojection artifact filled maps to maps with misaligned stripes of data to uncredited Venera data.

[StargazeInWonder]

It's a mess indeed. I don't know what bearing this has on the conclusions of the paper, but it certainly looks like the data is not in a good state.
Blink gif attached.

It seems like forcing the three main features below and to the left of center to correspond in the two images would require a significant re-projection. If the "expanded" caldera is a widening of the original one, it's hard to interpret in which direction(s) it expanded.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Brian Swift]

FWIW, the paper's 2nd author, Dr Hensley, isn't a SAR noob. He developed SRTM's strip image processor (and I think Cassini's too).
Honestly, when I saw his name on the paper, I was a bit disappointed the result wasn't found by reprocessing the raw signal data.