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Magellan to Venus

This color-coded view of Venus shows highlands and lowlands.

Magellan to Venus

Overview:

Although Venus is Earth's closest neighbor both in distance and size, its environment is strikingly different from ours. The planet named for the goddess of love is a scorchingly hot world with a surface temperature of about 470 C (about 900 F). The chokingly thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide is blanketed by clouds of sulfuric acid that hide the planet's surface from our view.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union sent orbiters to Venus that used imaging radar to pierce the veil of the swirling clouds and map the planet's surface. Magellan was created as a follow-on to those missions, dramatically improving on their mapping resolution.

Carried into Earth orbit in the cargo bay of Space Shuttle Atlantis in a launch from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on May 4, 1989, Magellan was propelled toward Venus by a solid-fuel motor called an Inertial Upper Stage. After a 15-month trip, Magellan went into orbit around Venus on August 10, 1990. Over the next four years it mapped 99 percent of the surface of Venus.

After concluding its radar mapping, Magellan made global maps of Venus's gravity field. Flight controllers also tested a new maneuvering technique called aerobraking, which uses a planet's atmosphere to slow or steer a spacecraft. On October 11, 1994, Magellan's orbit was lowered a final time, causing the spacecraft to become caught in the atmosphere and plunge to the surface; contact was lost the following day. Although much of Magellan was believed to be vaporized, some sections probably hit the planet's surface intact.

Martin Marietta Corp. was the prime contractor for the Magellan spacecraft. The imaging radar system was built by Hughes Aircraft Co.