Book on Venus Features Studies from Gilmore Lab

When Martha Gilmore, dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, was in graduate school, she read a series of books detailing comprehensive knowledge of Venus. She recalled wondering how an individual gets to be the person writing that paper or that book chapter that serves as the scientific community’s foundational piece of knowledge on a particular topic. This year, she answered the question.

The International Space Science Institute published Venus: Evolution Through Time, a collection of the preeminent papers on the current knowledge of how Venus formed, evolved, and reached its current state. The book includes five papers written by Gilmore and current and former members of her lab at Wesleyan—former postdoctoral student Jérémy Brossier, Terra Ganey ’21, and Senior Research Scientist Alison Santos.

“It’s incredibly gratifying for me to have done that scope of work and have it come together in this way,” Gilmore said.

She also said it is particularly meaningful to be able to help lead the next generation of researchers to an accomplishment of this magnitude, especially other women in a male-dominated field.

“It’s really important, we need people to see that that they can be the person who writes the book, or the overview chapter in the book,” Gilmore said.

The book comes at a pivotal time for the exploration of Venus, the book’s editors said in an editorial. Three upcoming missions exploring the planet—VERITAS, DAVINCI, and EnVision—hope to answer questions about present-day Venus and its long-term evolution. Gilmore is a science team member on both the VERITAS and DAVINCI missions.

“These three missions will tell us fundamental things we don’t know about Venus,” Gilmore said. “We need these data sets to advance our understanding of this and other Earth-like planets.”

Two of the papers Gilmore co-authored are particularly notable, one regarding the mineral makeup of Venus and the other on the evolution of its rocks.

“As with all planets, the mineralogy of the Venus surface provides a critical record of geologic and climatologic history, and the current chemical exchanges between the atmosphere and solid body,” she said in her paper. This paper details an independent investigation of Venus’ surface materials.

Venus’s atmosphere is incredibly thick, making it difficult to determine what minerals are present on its surface, Gilmore said. In 2015, Gilmore utilized a window in Venus’ atmosphere that allowed researchers to use spectroscopy to study a small portion of the planet’s light spectrum to infer mineral composition. “Mineralogy of the Venus Surface” further investigates this window and other methods of constraining mineralogy, including unique radar signatures reported on by Gilmore, Brossier, Katie Toner ‘20 and Avi Stein ‘17. The VERITAS mission will use these techniques to further study Venus’s surface.

The book also includes “Sedimentary Processes on Venus,” a study that determined sedimentary rocks are likely present on Venus. This finding challenges earlier interpretations of Venus imaging that suggested “Venus is a volcanic planet with little sediment cover and perhaps few processes for generating sedimentary rocks,” the paper said.

“Sediments and sedimentary rocks are critical to understanding how Venus works today, but are also extremely important for determining how Venus’s climate has changed through time and whether it was once a habitable planet,” the paper said.

Gilmore said this paper, in part, grew out of Ganey’s senior thesis project on impact cratering—which is thought to be the primary mechanism for producing sediment on Venus.

Alongside these two papers, Gilmore’s Lab contributed to chapters on the history of volcanic activity on Venus, future missions and investigations of the planet, and how volcanic and tectonic constraints impacted the planet’s evolution.