9/20/2023 0 Comments Grateful dead space nasa![]() Magellan’s explorations ended in 1994, marking the last time NASA sent a dedicated mission to Venus. ![]() Magellan’s data sharpened what has become one of the greatest unanswered questions in planetary science: What transformed Venus-the second planet from the sun, and a near twin of Earth in size and composition-into such an unearthly and apocalyptic state? Why did these two similar, neighboring planets have such staggeringly divergent stories? Smrekar recalls watching the initial radar images come in, revealing a bizarre world covered in few craters, a surfeit of volcanoes and rolling plains of frozen lava. Launched in 1989, Magellan was equipped with a radar system that peered underneath the planet’s thick clouds to map its entire surface for the first time. In some sense, her interplanetary destiny seemed preordained even before she was born: her father hails from a rural community in Pennsylvania named Venus.įittingly, the very first mission Smrekar worked on was NASA’s Venus orbiter Magellan. But instead of becoming an astronaut, she ended up as a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she worked on robotic explorers of other worlds. Like many kids, Sue Smrekar dreamed that she would one day voyage into space.
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