Tessera terrain, Venus

Filed under pretty pictures, amateur image processing, Venus, Venus missions before 2000

Go Back

This is an area of Venus located southeast of Fortuna Tessera. The bright, rough terrain is "tessera"; the dark material between it is smoother lava plains. The plains are cut by polygonal cracks and folded by wrinkle ridges. Plains lavas have flowed into linear cracks in the tessera, indicating that the plains lavas came after the tessera.

NASA / JPL / mapaplanet.org / Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a direct link to the map-a-planet page for this part of Venus. The whole area is about 485 by 420 kilometers in size. It is a region from 40 to 44 degrees north latitude by 47 to 53 degrees east longitude. The black vertical stripe at the left side of the image is a data gore (where Magellan either did not take or did not successfully transmit that orbit's data).

Copyright holder: Emily Lakdawalla

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about January 1, 1994