Magellan

Mission Profile

Magellan was NASA's Venus radar mapping spacecraft, launched on 4 May 1989 aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis and deployed into orbit around Venus in August 1990. Over four years it used synthetic aperture radar to penetrate Venus's permanent cloud cover and map 98% of the planet's surface at 100-meter resolution, producing the most detailed global radar map of any planet other than Earth. Magellan revealed a young volcanic surface reshaped by massive volcanic eruptions within the past 300-600 million years, abundant tectonic features unlike any on Earth, and the absence of plate tectonics as Earth knows it. At mission's end in October 1994, Magellan was deliberately commanded into the Venusian atmosphere in a controlled aerobraking and destruction maneuver to gather atmospheric density data.