Twenty years ago today — May 4, 1989 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-30. Astronauts David M. Walker, Ronald J. Grabe, Norman E. Thagard, Mary L. Cleave, and Mark C. Lee deployed the Magellan spacecraft on its voyage to map the planet Venus.
(STS-30 mission patch. Click to enlarge.)
The Magellan mission used synthetic aperture radar to map 98% of the planet’s surface before contact with the spacecraft was lost in October 1994. More information about the mission is available on this NASA page.
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