These images are composites of the complete radar image collection obtained by the Magellan mission. The Magellan spacecraft was launched aboard space shuttle Atlantis in May 1989 and began mapping the surface of Venus in September 1990. The spacecraft continued to orbit Venus for four years, returning high-resolution images, altimetry, thermal emissions and gravity maps of 98 percent of the surface. The surface of Venus is displayed in these five global views. Magellan synthetic aperture radar mosaics are mapped onto a rectangular latitude-longitude grid to create this image.
Simulated color is used to enhance small-scale structure.
The simulated hues are based on color images recorded by the Soviet Venera 13 and 14 spacecraft. The bright region near the center in the polar view is Maxwell Montes, the highest mountain range on Venus. The scattered dark patches in this image are halos surrounding some of the younger impact craters. This global data set reveals a number of craters consistent with an average Venus surface age of 300 million to 500 million years. The image was produced by the Solar System Visualization Project and the Magellan science team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory' s Multimission Image Processing Laboratory.