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originally posted by: Albert999
Check this pic of Venus, I was hoping the Uranus pic would be more like this.
news.sky.com...
originally posted by: Saint Exupery
originally posted by: Albert999
Check this pic of Venus, I was hoping the Uranus pic would be more like this.
news.sky.com...
That's not a photograph. Venus' thick clouds of sulfuric acid make it impossible to see the surface. That image was rendered from radar maps from a probe orbiting the planet. The technique is called Imaging Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR)
The Magellan probe mapped Venus. The Cassini probe mapped parts of Saturn's moon Titan, though it's coverage and resolution wasn't as good because the probe was orbiting the planet and not the moon, and was thus only able to get radar swaths during flybys.
ISAR has been used by aircraft and orbiting satellites with surprising results here on Earth. It has found temples, aqueducts and even entire ancient cities buried in the jungles of Central America and Southeast Asia. An experimental ISAR flown on the Space Shuttle in the '80s found prehistoric riverbeds under the sands of the Sahara desert. Archaeologist went to the sites and found signs of ancient human settlements. Of course, the military uses it to find, map and identify targets in night and bad weather.