IMAGES AND TOPOGRAPHIC RELIEF AT THE NORTH-POLE OF VENUS

We report on the analysis of unique coverage of the north pole of Venus using a subset of 13 images from a total of about 775 synthetic aperture radar orbits during cycle 1 of the Magellan mission. We present images at 13 distinctly different azimuths that range over 360-degrees in longitude and that show the topographic relief at vastly different imaging geometries at intervals of about 20-degrees. A pair of intersecting or crossing orbits is used to assess the topographic relief with stereo radargrammetric techniques, and to refine this assessment using a multi-image clinometric approach. We show that the pole is located in accentuated topography with elevation differences in the range of no more than 1 km. We conclude that pinpointing the location of the pole from the overlapping images and standard mission data is accurate to within about 100 pixels or 8 km (RMS).