Getting your player ready...
Berlin – A photo of the south pole of Venus taken by the Venus Express spacecraft was released today – revealing a twist of cloud swirling around the far end of Earth’s neighbor that closely resembles cloud formations around the more familiar north pole.
The image, taken from a distance of roughly 124,000 miles and released by the Max Planck institute in Germany, is grainy, but shows pale yellow clouds ribbed with darker spirals.
It was taken by a camera run by the institute that is one of seven instruments aboard the European Space Agency’s Venus Express, which went into orbit around the planet Monday.
