T140 Best Practices and Exciting Discoveries in Identifying, Mapping, and Analyzing Planetary Landforms and Terrestrial Analogues

Monday, 23 September 2024
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
213A

AVENGERS (ANALOGS FOR VENUS GEOLOGICALLY RECENT SURFACES) INITIATIVE: AN INVESTIGATION OF TERRESTRIAL ANALOG ACTIVE VOLCANO-TECTONIC AREAS FOR VENUS EXPLORATION

Paper number: T140-2
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 1:35 PM – 1:55 PM

Authors

Abstract

One of the key questions for Venus remains whether it is volcanically active today, and if it is what the volcanism and resurfacing rate is. In the next decade, we will have extensive new data for the surface of Venus from the upcoming accepted and potential missions to Venus – NASA’s DAVINCI (Garvin et al. 2022) and VERITAS (Smrekar et al. 2022) missions, ESA’s EnVision mission (Ghail et al. 2017, 2020), Roscosmos’ Venera-D mission (Zasova et al. 2019), China’s VOICE mission (Wang et al. 2022), ISRO’s Shukrayaan-I mission (Sundararajan 2021), and the privately funded Venus Life Finder mission (Seager et al. 2022). In order to help prepare for this new era of Venus exploration the “Analogs for VENus’ GEologically Recent Surfaces” (AVENGERS) initiative aims at investigating several terrestrial analog sites for the comparative study of recent and possibly ongoing volcanic activity on Venus. Besides its scientific importance, the AVENGERS initiative acts as a bridge for international scientific collaboration, including the leaderships and/or team members from all the currently selected missions to Venus. Our first site selection is Mt Etna (D’Incecco et al. 2024) one of the most active and monitored volcanoes on Earth. We directly compared Mount Etna with Idunn Mons, which is a potentially active volcano on Venus (Smrekar et al. 2010; D’Incecco et al. 2021). The two volcanic edifices show interesting points of comparison: a) comparable morpho-structural setting, since both volcanoes interact with a rift zone, and b) morphologically similar volcanic fields around both Mount Etna and Idunn Mons. Here we will discuss the main objectives of the project, and the preliminary criteria of selection that will be used to select the analog sites on Earth. We will then provide examples of active volcanic areas on Earth that we intend to use as endmembers volcanoes for the analysis of potential active volcanism on Venus. Finally, we will list the methodologies that will be used in our ongoing and future investigations.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 56, No. 5

doi: 10.1130/abs/2024AM-403006

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