Venus could still be spewing lava, and scientists are hellbent on proving it

Two planetary scientists may have found the first evidence of an active Venusian volcano hiding in 30-year-old radar scans.

The hellish Venus surface in 5 vintage photosMagellan changed that. Launched in 1989 and equipped with the finest radar that the technology of its time could offer, Magellan mapped much of Venus to the resolution of a city block. In the probe’s charts, scientists found evidence of—but no smoking gun of live volcanic activity.

But researchers in the early 1990s didn’t have the sophisticated software and image-analysis tools that their counterparts have today. If they wanted to compare Magellan’s maps then, they’d have had to do it manually, comparing printouts with the naked eye. So, Herrick and Hensley revisited Magellan’s data with more advanced computers.

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