The spacecraft that mapped Venus through its clouds, in hand-formed metal.Handcrafted with Magellan's large dish antenna, bus structure and solar panels.Details Handcrafted metal construction High-gain dish antenna and bus detail Solar panel arrays Hand-finished surfaces Ready to display The missionVenus is permanently hidden beneath sulphuric acid cloud, so Magellan carried radar instead of cameras and used the same big dish for both imaging and talking to Earth — mapping on one part of each orbit, transmitting on the other.Between 1990 and 1994 it mapped 98 percent of the surface at better resolution than most maps of Earth's seafloor. It also pioneered aerobraking, dipping into the Venusian atmosphere to slow itself and change orbit without fuel — a technique now used routinely at Mars. At the end of the mission controllers flew it deliberately into the atmosphere to gather final data as it burned.
