The field campaigns will help refine the VERITAS mission, which is expected to fly no earlier than 2031.
"Iceland is a volcanic country that sits atop a hot plume. Venus is a volcanic planet with plentiful geological evidence for active plumes," Suzanne Smrekar, senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the VERITAS principal investigator, said in the same statement."Its geological similarities make Iceland an excellent place to study Venus on Earth, helping the science team prepare for Venus.
Using a tripod-mounted lidar scanner, the science team created this image that highlighted the ropy texture of new rock formed by a recent lava flow near Iceland's Litli-Hrútur volcano. This will be used to compare with the campaign's airborne radar images of the same region. During their campaign, the team also visited Fagradalsfjall in southwestern Iceland to collect more samples for further analysis, while an aircraft circling above captured radar images of the same area.
"We collected information in the field to ground-truth the radar data that we will use to inform the science that VERITAS will do at Venus," Daniel Nunes, the VERITAS deputy project scientist at JPL, said in the same statement. Ultimately, these efforts will help in refining the algorithms onboard VERITAS to better identify changes on the surface of Venus since NASA's
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