Venus often gets called Earth‘s sister planet because it’s similar in size and rocky makeup. Yet beyond that, the resemblance ends pretty quickly. What lies beneath its thick, forever clouded atmosphere is a harsh, almost alien landscape shaped by intense volcanic activity and geological forces we’re only beginning to understand.
As I dove into recent findings and historic missions, I found it fascinating how Venus transformed from a mysterious glowing orb in Earth‘s sky to a complex world with active volcanoes, dynamic atmosphere, and clues to its dramatic evolution. Far from just a dull, featureless ball, Venus has proven to be a planetary puzzle that’s quietly kept its secrets until now.
Venus through the eyes of early explorers
Back in the 1970s and 80s, the Soviet Union’s Venera program took on one of the most incredible challenges in space exploration. The landers Venera 9 and Venera 10 were the first to brave Venus’s brutal surface conditions—from crushing pressure to searing heat. Though they lasted only about an hour, they beamed back the very first grainy black and white photos of a rocky, barren plane beneath an orange sky, changing everything we thought about the planet’s surface.
A bit later, Venera 13 and Venera 14 sent the first color images, revealing fractured stones and flat slabs surprisingly reminiscent of Earth’s terrain. These pioneering glimpses proved that Venus was more than just a hidden ball of clouds—it had a complex surface, but we still couldn’t see it properly until we had better tools.
Radar opens the curtain on Venus’s secret landscape
The real breakthrough came in 1990 when NASA’s Mellan spacecraft started peeling back the veil of clouds using synthetic aperture radar. Radar waves can penetrate Venus’s thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and sulfuric acid clouds, bouncing off the surface and revealing remarkable detail. Over four years, Mellan mapped nearly 98% of the planet’s surface, uncovering towering volcanoes, vast basalt plains, winding rifts, and those strange, deformed highlands called tesserae.
Radar images showed Venus wasn’t just static; evidence suggested volcanism was still alive, a notion that stirred excitement because atmospheric sulfur dioxide fluctuations hinted at recent volcanic eruptions. Radar remains a vital tool to this day, letting scientists create three-dimensional topographic maps and identify surface roughness and composition patterns, like metal-rich frost on mountain tops.
Radar mapping transformed Venus from a featureless white sphere into a richly detailed, geologically active planet with towering volcanoes and vast plain formations.
Infrared and beyond: seeing Venus’s hidden heat and atmosphere
Visible light cameras just can’t cut through Venus’s permanent clouds, but infrared spectral imaging unveils the heat signature of its night side. I came across insights about the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission, which operated from 2006 to 2014 and carried an instrument called Vertis, a thermal imaging spectrometer. Vertis detected hot surface rocks’ faint glow through small infrared windows in the atmosphere—illuminating young lava flows and hinting that volcanic activity on Venus might be incredibly recent, geologically speaking.
In fact, a reanalysis in 2023 of Mellan’s decades-old radar data confirmed a volcanic eruption on Maat Mons—the first direct treasure trove of proof that Venus still erupts. This reshapes how we think of our planetary neighbor: Venus is not a dead rock but a simmering world, with active volcanism that could still be reshaping its surface.
Infrared imaging further helps map temperature and chemical makeup at various atmospheric layers, revealing phenomena like jet stream–speed winds, giant atmospheric gravity waves, and even oxygen and carbon loss into space—a brutal reality of solar wind stripping that likely explains why Venus lost its early water.
New eyes and upcoming missions: a fresh surge in Venus exploration
Exploration paused a bit after Mellan, but recent years have brought a surprising revival. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, despite being designed to study the sun, opportunistically snapped the first visible light images of Venus’s night side from space. It captured faint thermal emissions highlighting surface features, proving just how resourceful modern missions can be.
Meanwhile, ESA’s BepiColombo and NASA’s Solar Orbiter flew past Venus on their way to other targets but managed to gather crucial data on Venus’s magnetosphere and atmospheric escape processes, opening a window into how the solar wind shapes the planet.
Japan’s Akatsuki orbiter has been monitoring Venus’s atmosphere since 2015, revealing astonishing wind patterns, stationary bow-shaped clouds linked to surface terrain, and the elusive super-rotation where the entire atmosphere whirls around Venus in four days—much faster than its surface rotation. Its multi-wavelength cameras have delivered detailed maps of cloud structures and temperature variations, giving us a dynamic view of the planet’s weather.
What’s next: Da Vinci, Veritus, and Envision change the game
The next decade promises a leap forward with three major missions poised to deepen our understanding. NASA’s Da Vinci will plunge a descent probe through Venus’s atmosphere around 2031 to directly sample its chemical composition and snap the highest-resolution images yet of the planet’s deformed highlands. This could uncover traces of ancient oceans or water-altered rocks—offering clues about Venus’s watery past.
Then there’s Veritus, another NASA mission designed to orbit Venus with a next-gen radar mapper that will provide 3D maps with incredible resolution—down to a few yards. Its instruments will detect subtle shifts in the surface that signal ongoing volcanic or tectonic activity, helping answer if Venus has something akin to plate tectonics. It’ll also look out for thermal hot spots and volcanic gas emissions, potentially catching eruptions as they happen.
On the European side, ESA’s Envision mission arriving in the 2030s will combine radar and multi-spectral imagers with unique subsurface radar able to probe nearly a mile beneath the surface. For the first time, we’ll get a peek under Venus’s crust, potentially revealing buried channels or sediment layers. Envision will also study interactions between the surface, atmosphere, and volcanic activity, aiming to unravel how Venus evolved so differently from Earth despite their shared origin.
Key takeaways
- Radar imaging has been critical to unveiling Venus’s hidden volcanic and tectonic landscape beneath thick clouds, revealing it’s a geologically active world.
- Infrared spectral imaging lets us see thermal emissions and young lava flows on the night side, providing the strongest evidence yet for ongoing volcanism.
- Upcoming missions Da Vinci, Veritus, and Envision promise to transform our understanding by combining direct atmospheric sampling, detailed surface mapping, and subsurface probing to solve Venus’s enduring mysteries.
Reflecting on Venus: a fiery mirror for Earth’s future?
Venus’s story is a stark reminder of how two planets born alike can tread wildly different paths. What was once a hopeful search for an Earth-twin has turned into a quest to understand a world transformed by runaway greenhouse effects and volcanic fury. Yet, as these explorations progress, we might learn crucial lessons about climate, geology, and planetary evolution that could even help us safeguard our own world.
With so many breakthroughs on the horizon, it’s exciting to think that the veil over our sister planet will soon lift, revealing not just its secrets but perhaps its fate—and a possible path to turning Venus into an Earth 2.0 someday. I can’t wait to see what discoveries await us in the next chapter of Venus exploration.
