Venus – The exoplanet next door
Venus is the same size as Earth and began under similarly hospitable conditions. Today it is a rocky ember hell. Researchers are trying hard to understand the different developments - because the findings point far beyond our own solar system.
When the newly elected US administration around President Ronald Reagan decided to make extensive cuts in US space research in 1982, the planned NASA mission "Venus Orbital Imaging Radar" VOIR was one of the victims. But the Department of Planetology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory resorted to unconventional methods: The scientists quickly scraped together leftover parts from other missions and used them to construct a cheaper spacecraft. The Magellan orbiter designed in this way, which was launched to Venus in 1989, cost only 680 million US dollars.
In 1990 he was there. Over the next five years, the instruments provided radar images of the entire planet's surface, data on gravity anomalies, and a topographic map of Venus. Magellan was the latest in a long line of Soviet and US missions to our neighboring planet. After the probe burned up in the planet's atmosphere as planned in 1994, NASA's interest in further flights to the Earth-sized celestial body ended with it. Since then, planners have submitted a good two dozen proposals for new missions – none have been approved. The data collected by Magellan provide the best map material to date…
