I thought this deserved its own topic...ESA just posted some images and a story on observations taken during the MESSENGER flyby. I assume we'll see a NASA / APL post later on the same topic.

Venusian rendezvous results: chapter one

Some interesting images here; I was quite surprised by the excellent match between the VIRTIS thermal image and the Magellan radar image. Looks like they're zeroing in on how to process those surface images!

--Emily

The surface stuff is pretty cool. There's one from Artemis Corona too, which I hope they will show soon.

I just consulted my solar system atlas...one of the cartographers please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the topography we're looking at in that image is in eastern Aphrodite, including parts of Diana and Dali Chasmae?

--Emily

I thought you were an expert in venus geology
yup, it seems to be around atahensik corona

http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/images/v37_comp.pdf

edit - oh by the way, I think these surface images are hardly processed at all! These regions are just regions with high altitude (thus radiance) contrast. It's pretty amazing really that you can see these things in the raw images.

Wouldn't they get a better match with the VIRTIS data if the scaling of the Magellan altimetry data was inverted here? Looks like the bright areas in one are dark in the other, and vice-versa, or am I wrong?

Low-res shaded relief of the same Magellan altimetry (rather than SAR) data here:
http://www.solarviews.com/raw/venus/topoven2.jpg

Did the release got pulled/postponed?

Strange ...
It comes up for a sec with Firefox (without any clickable links on it), and then I get redirected to the main VE page.

Yes, very odd. The page of images and captions accompanying the article is still online though, here.

The Messenger Fly-By page got yanked from the ESA web site. The ESA people were ready to go, thought they had NASA/APL agreement, and posted it. But NASA/APL weren't ready yet, so it had to be pulled down again. Should be back up as soon as both sides of the Atlantic get their ducks in a row. I guess one location didn't get pulled down yet, though.