... but when Magellan images became available they attracted more attention:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vladimir-Gubenko/publication/258780090_Perspectives_of_the_bistatic_radar_and_occultation_studying_of_the_Venus_atmosphere_and_surface/links/53e8b0a60cf21cc29fdc837b/Perspectives-of-the-bistatic-radar-and-occultation-studying-of-the-Venus-atmosphere-and-surface.pdf

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2016/pdf/2094.pdf

(similar content, slightly more condensed URL)

If I continued with my Venus atlas project I would certainly have been mapping this stuff, but it's not going to happen.

Tomorrow it's time to move on the Venera 10.
#venus #venera9

When we looked at Soviet lunar missions I showed the Luna 22 bistatic radar image of part of the Moon. It didn't tell us much we didn't know about the Moon (rocky surfaces and slopes facing the radar will reflect it on to the detector). But a year later Venera 9 used bistatic radar to study Venus, an utterly unknown surface, so in a sense the Luna 22 lunar data are like 'ground truth' for Venus. The results were published at the time in a Russian journal...
#venus #venera9

Lastly... that odd object protruding into the foreground is a densitometer dropped onto the surface to estimate its hardness. There is one other interesting Venera 9 dataset to mention... tomorrow.
#venus #venera9

Here's that map with its crudely separated section. But what's this? Why have I rotated it? As far as I can tell there is absolutely no information about the orientation of the map, so here it is in an arbitrary orientation. I suppose a whole-sky image might have revealed the direction of the sun (30 degrees above the horizon), but we don't have one. Shadows don't tell us anything, they are all just under rocks, not to one side. There's a lot we don't know.
#venus #venera9