New discoveries put Venus in the exclusive club of volcanically active bodies in the Solar System, joining Earth and Jupiter’s moon Io.  The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express mission, which has been in orbit around Venus since 2006, returned data on the composition of Venus’ atmosphere.  This was combined with data from NASA’s Magellan probe, which mapped the planet in great detail using a combination of Radar and high resolution gravity data to reveal the shape and structure of the Venusian surface.

Venus has an extremely dense atmosphere, some ninety times thicker that that of Earth, so it has very powerful wind erosion which has worn the surface down to a much smoother level than that on Earth.  However, these new data reveal several volcanic structures which are still standing, and so must have been formed within the last two to three million years (practically yesterday, in geological terms).  While there may not be any active volcanoes on Venus (that we’ve found), it does indicate that there is still plenty activity beneath the surface.

Venus has long been called Earth’s twin planet, since it has almost the same size and mass, and now it seems it may have a similar internal structure as well.  For more information, see this article from NASA