30 years ago NASA accidentally captured another 'living' planet?

US scientists have turned to data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft, taken more than 30 years ago, and found surprising evidence that another planet in the Solar System is still geologically active.

The Magellan spacecraft, also known as the Venus Radar Mapper , was launched by NASA in 1989 and ended its mission in 1994, but its massive dataset continues to reveal interesting things as image and signal analysis techniques become more advanced.

This time, a team of scientists led by geophysicist Robert Herick from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (USA) and radar engineering expert Scott Hensley from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) analyzed images collected by the Magellan spacecraft from the early 1990s to 1991.

3D perspective of the Maat Mons region on Venus - (Photo: NASA).

In a report on March 15, NASA said they had identified a clear change in the shape of a volcanic vent on the surface of Venus in just 8 months, vivid evidence that Venus is still geologically active !

The reason the discovery was overshadowed for so long is partly because the spacecraft's elliptical orbit causes image data about each of its areas to be subject to many errors and must be analyzed manually instead of by machine.

This small volcano is located near two of Venus' supervolcanoes, Ozza and Maat Mons . It may be part of Mat Mons, with data from October 2, 1991 showing that it appears to have undergone an eruption, distorting its previously roughly circular shape of 2.2 km ^{2 and expanding it to 4 km 2} .

The surrounding terrain also changed, as if it had been ravaged by fresh lava just moments before.

On Earth, the planet's geological activities often cause disasters, but are also extremely necessary for life because they provide factors that help stabilize temperature, environment, and the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

So finding a geologically active planet is an astronomer's dream. It is one of the core factors that shows that the planet is capable of nurturing life.

Returning to Venus, it has long been proven that it was born as Earth's twin with all the conditions for life - and is still in the "habitable zone" of the Solar System - but was hit by many unfortunate factors in the planet's evolution that caused it to slow down, become geologically inactive and be enveloped by a fierce greenhouse effect.

One thing that once led people to believe Venus was dead was that its lithosphere is a continuous crust , rather than being made up of tectonic plates like Earth. Earth's volcanoes usually erupt at the edges of tectonic plates. But the new findings suggest that volcanoes on other planets may have worked differently.

This location will be a mysterious place for NASA's next missions to explore. Several studies in recent years have found potential biosignatures in the planet's spectrum, something the US space agency has clearly shown interest in.

The new study was just published in the journal Science.