Revitalizing Soviet Image Data From Venus

An anonymous reader writes "As everyone looks at Mars, a scientist has produced the best images ever obtained from the surface of a rather different planet - Venus. By using - and reprocessing - data from the Soviet Venera missions he got some really nice gems. To be found at BBC News Online and at mentallandscape.com. Nice images which resemble much that of the current Mars missions can be found here(1) and at here(2). By the way, did you know that Venus was more often targeted by space probes than Mars, including a number of ten (!) successful landers?"

It's really cool that he's doing this ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... and I'm looking forward to seeing the higher-res pictures that he says will be coming. But honestly, the main reason everyone is focusing on Mars right now is because there really doesn't seem to be that much to find on Venus. We know it's an acidic pressure cooker covered with bare rock; the odds of there ever having been any kind of life there that we could detect seem vanishingly small, and we're not going to be living there any time soon either. Mars seems potentially a lot more promising for both exploration and colonization.