Hotter than Mercury, and it spins backwards. Venus spins backwards, so slowly that a day there is longer than its year, and its clouds trap so much heat that it is hotter than Mercury, which is nearer the Sun.
Across
12,100 km
Surface
460.2 million km²
A day
117 Earth days
A year
225 Earth days
From the Sun
108 million km
Gravity
0.9 × the Earth’s
Temperature
464 °C
Moons
0
What you’re seeing
The ground under the clouds, mapped by Magellan’s radar from 1990 to 1994. Radar sees no colour, so the orange is added, after the light the Soviet landers photographed; bright means rough.
Named places
Maxwell Montes: The highest mountains on Venus, 11 km above the average ground. They are the one big feature named after a man, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
Ishtar Terra: One of Venus’s two “continents”: a highland in the far north about the size of Australia.
Lakshmi Planum: A high plateau 2,345 km across, ringed by mountains, standing about 4 km above the land around it.
Aphrodite Terra: The other “continent”: a highland 10,000 km long along the equator, reaching a quarter of the way round the planet.
Maat Mons: The highest volcano on Venus, about 8 km tall. In 2023 scientists found a vent beside it that changed shape between Magellan’s radar passes in 1991: a volcano erupting in our time.
Beta Regio: A highland split by a great rift valley, with a huge volcano, Theia Mons, at its heart.
Alpha Regio: One of the first features ever seen on Venus, by radar from the Earth in the 1960s. It keeps the Greek letter it was given then.
Artemis Corona: A ring of ridges 2,600 km across, the largest “corona” on Venus: where hot rock pushed the crust up from below, then sank back.
Venera 7: The first spacecraft to send news from the surface of another planet. It found 475 °C and lasted 23 minutes.
Venera 9: The first pictures from the surface of another planet: flat rocks under an orange sky.
Venera 13: The first colour pictures from Venus. It lasted 127 minutes in heat that melts lead and air 90 times as heavy as ours.