ASTRONOMERS have glimpsed the surface of Venus for the first time in 10 years
by turning the world’s two largest radio telescopes into a giant radar
scanner.
Most astronomy is based simply on observing the light or other radiation
reaching us from objects in space. This can’t tell us about the surface of Venus
because it is hidden by thick clouds.
A team led by Donald Campbell of Cornell University, using the Arecibo
telescope in Puerto Rico, got round this problem by firing a beam of radio waves
at the planet. While visible light is scattered by the cloud cover,…
