Figure 2: (a) Elevation versus emissivity plots obtained for the studied sites. Dashed lines in plots are mean global values of emissivity at 0.85 (vertical, black), and planetary radius at 6,051.8 km (horizontal, gray). (b) Magnitude of emissivity excursions (percent change from global average value of 0.85) detected in each site versus corresponding altitude and temperature. Temperatures are given by the Vega 2 lander data (Brossier et al., 2020; Lorenz et al., 2018; Seiff, 1987).From Brossier et al., 2022 .
The wealth of data to be provided by the future missions will tell us more about ongoing volcanic activity on Venus. For this reason, it is crucial to select a number of relevant volcanically and tectonically active areas on Earth as suitable Venus’s analogues. To this regard, Project “Analogues for VENus’s GEologically Recent Surfaces” aims to create a list of suitable analogue volcanic sites on Earth, which can help us to: i) collect spectral signatures from lava flow samples on Earth, whose chemical composition is known, to compare with the spectra to be provided by the future investigations of Venus; ii) analyze radar backscattering over volcanically active areas on Earth to check how to evaluate changes in the areal extent of the lava flows in short amounts of time due to the effect of possibly ongoing eruptions; and iii) use easily accessible volcanic sites on Earth as test areas for drilling operations and in-situ elemental analyses. As a first analogue site for Project AVENGERS, preliminary studies are currently being conducted on Mount Etna, one of the most active and well monitored volcanoes on Earth. Building off this, studying active and recently active volcanism on the Earth is vital to test models for Venus exploration, such as Brossier et al. (2022) in order to be able to constrain potentially active volcanism and tectonism on Venus with the future missions due to arrive and make repeated measurements over the same surface previously measured by Magellan.