The Magellan Probe Reached Venus
On this day · 10 August 1990
Built largely from leftover spacecraft parts, NASA's Magellan slipped into Venusian orbit to lift the veil on a hidden world.
On August 10, 1990, NASA’s Magellan orbiter arrived at Venus and fired its motor to brake into orbit around Earth’s cloud-shrouded twin. The spacecraft had launched from the Space Shuttle Atlantis in May 1989, becoming the first interplanetary probe deployed from a shuttle.
Venus hides its surface beneath a permanent blanket of thick sulfuric-acid clouds, so ordinary cameras are useless. Magellan instead carried synthetic-aperture radar, which pierces the clouds to map terrain by bouncing radio waves off the ground. Routine high-quality radar imaging began on September 15, 1990.
Magellan ultimately charted about 98 percent of the planet’s surface in sharp detail.
The mission revealed a world of vast volcanic plains, towering mountains, and strange circular features, returning more data than all previous planetary probes combined. After four years of mapping, Magellan plunged into the Venusian atmosphere in 1994, ending one of NASA’s most productive planetary missions.
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