Venus, our next frontier here at the
Goddard Space Flight Center looking with
Wallops we have simulated what it would
be like to freefall descent to the
surface of Venus with cameras that would
allow us to see the surface from above
for the first time in human history at
scales that are similar to those we
experience as we land in aircraft at
airports here on earth and these images
are synthetic images but actually made
from our helicopter experiment to show
what landscapes on Venus would look like
if a future prober Lander were to go
there we want to use these images to
allow us to reconstruct what the
landscapes of this this crazy planet are
like so using the Wallops Flight
Facility helicopter equipped with
cameras viewing it nadir we simulated
the final 2,000 meters of descent on
Venus over a rugged quarry system with
landscapes that are similar to those we
find on planets like Mars and Venus and
using a camera system like those that
could be carried on probes we image the
sands and the gravels and the boulders
and the other textures that we found on
planets as we descend it here you can
see the rugged boulders that some of us
feel might exist in the highlands of
Venus we also see fields of gravels and
conical hills that remind us of small
volcanoes these images are collected at
meter resolution and finer from a camera
pointing straight down as we descend at
about 10 meters a second to the surface
of Venus and by taking these pictures
and using structure from motion
algorithms we can put them together to
form the first ever topographic models
of the surface of another world from
landing and these models constructed
from small numbers of images look like
this colored maps of what's high and
what slow these relief features allow us
to depict the landscapes quantitatively
to model their origin what's been going
on here you see a conical Hill of gravel
shown in yellows and greens and blues
against a backdrop of a smooth plain we
could see landscapes like this in the
highlands of Venus and this is the
quality of topography we could produce
on any future probe or lander to Venus
and we believe this is important for
untangling the history of our sister
planet and by putting the images to
other with the topography we can make
perspective views synthesize the views
that we might see at the ground or as we
climb into these hills so the team at
Goddard Space Flight Center and Wallops
Flight Facility conducted this
experiment to stimulate the future
exploration of the planet Venus in the
2020s and beyond with a vision of using
our eyes wide open as we descend in a
freefall geometry to see Venus in 3d our
next stop we believe is Venus the lost
ocean world...