Lava Flows on Venus

The hot surface of Venus shows clear signs of ancient lava flows . Evidence of this was bolstered by the robot spacecraft Magellan , which orbited Venus in the early 1990s. Using imaging radar, Magellan was able to peer beneath the thick perpetual clouds that cover Earth's closest planetary neighbor. Picture above , lava apparently flowed down from the top of the image and pooled in the light colored areas visible across the image middle and bottom. The lava cut a channel across the darker ridge that runs horizontally across the image center. The picture covers about 500 kilometers across. The lava originates from a caldera named Ammavaru that lies about 300 kilometers off the image top . The hot dense climate makes Venus a more difficult planet on which to land spacecraft and rovers . Venus currently sparkles as the brightest object in the western sky after sunset.