Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · Jun 14 New paper alert! tl;dr: parts of what we thought were the oldest rocks on Venus might in fact be among the youngest. This story involves the "tessera" on Venus, which is some of the weirdest stuff in the Solar System. A thread:
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First off, let's talk about what tesserae (sing. tessera) are. Well, we don't quite know. They're heavily tectonically deformed rocks, and they brighter (which means rougher) on radar imagery than volcanic plains, which make up most of Venus' surface. Here's an example of tessera, Alpha Regio:
Huh !
[Tesserae in space, you say…? @wittspat.bsky.social ]
There’s only one solution. We need to put a man in Venus. And that man is Paul Byrne. And he will survive maybe a few picoseconds but he’ll get great data. 🫡