NASA Planetary Data System, MicroWave Sub-Node

Mission:      Venera 15/16
Phase:        Mapping
Instrument:   Synthetic Aperture Radar
Dataset:      Venera Radar Backscatter Measurements
Origin:       Institute for Radio Engineering and Electronics, Moscow
Cognizant:    Alexander I. Zakharov (for Acad. Kotelnikov)
Size:         571x434 pixels (64 colors, 221851 bytes)
Format:       GIF

This is a small portion of Venera quadrangle 5. It was constructed by
merging data taken on several orbits of the Venera 15 and 16 spacecraft
in 1983. The radars were looking down from the left at altitudes of
about 1000 km and at 12 degree incidence angles. In the center of the
image, the summits of Maxwell Montes fall away sharply to the
relatively flat plateau called Lakshmi Planum (left) in a series of
steep west-facing escarpments, several of which are more than 1
kilometer high. This synthetic aperture image has a resolution of about
2 kilometers and has been filtered to reduce the overall brightness
contrast.