Launch of Magellan

Magellan was a NASA probe that mapped Venus with radar, launched from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the first interplanetary spacecraft to be sent from a shuttle. It reached Venus in 1990 and used synthetic aperture radar to see through the planet's thick clouds, mapping almost the whole surface at high resolution. The images revealed volcanic plains, thousands of volcanoes, tectonic features and strange pancake-like domes, and very few impact craters, suggesting that the surface is geologically young, only a few hundred million years old. The probe also measured the planet's gravity field. At the end of its mission in 1994 it was sent into the atmosphere to burn up, as a final experiment. It was named after the explorer Ferdinand Magellan.

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