Venus is concealed behind clouds. But for the first time, a camera has peered through that haze and photographed the planet’s surface.
Clouds tend to scatter and absorb light. But some wavelengths of light get through, depending on the clouds’ chemical makeup, says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study.
Though scientists knew such spectral windows exist in Venus’ thick clouds of sulfuric acid, the researchers didn’t expect light visible to human eyes would break through so intensely. And while WISPR was designed to study the sun’s atmosphere, its construction also happens to allow it to detect this unanticipated window of light in Venus’ clouds. “It’s fortuitous that they happened to have an instrument that could see through the clouds,” Byrne says.
While flying by Venus in February 2021, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captured visible light coming from the planet’s surface by using the probe’s two WISPR telescopes — WISPR-0 and WISPR-1 . Darker regions represent cooler highlands, while lighter regions represent hotter lowlands.The photographs show a planet so hot that it glows, much like red-hot iron, said Brian Wood, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
“The pattern of bright and dark that you see is basically a temperature map,” he said — brighter regions are hotter and darker regions are cooler. This pattern correlates well with topographic maps previously produced from radar and infrared surveys. Highlands appear dark and lowlands appear bright, Wood said.to Venus . The new photographs, Wood said, “may help in the interpretation of the observations taken in the future from these new missions.