"And there was some other data that suggested they were weathered or very young"-Robert Herrick

When the headlines went around yesterday, I thought this was a followup on the old Venus Express stuff. A second observation of what Grinspoon called hotspots. Sudden thermal spikes, best explained as dragging the thermometer over lava as Venus Express flew over. But no. New flows. Flooowwwwsss. Do you know what you can do with VERITAS and repeat pass radar interferometry of brand new surface flows? A lot. The problem is that we can't be totally certain it's not just a viewing error.

• Slide we've been seeing for the last two days at 4:20 (giggles). Remember with radar smooth means pale and rougher is darker.
• Because the time gap is 9 months apart we have a flow rate!
• Slide at 12:15 comes with a history of why old Magellan data is able to pay off even though it's data from the Beverly Hills 90210 era.
• At 16:40 the slide is showing Maat Mons. We'll be hearing more about Venus' largest mountain. But there are some features that are suspected to be flows coming down, so that's literally what the NASA Venus crew is obsessing over right now.
• Slide at 20:20. Emphasis on how easy it is to screw up radar interpretations to the point specialist debate is mandatory.
• Slide at 25:25 is the computer simulation test. Announcement worthy proof.

As far as I know VERITAS does not carry any special spectrometer. That's DAVINCI's thing, but won't help much on this topic. What VERITAS can do is is get geographical details good enough to imagine field geology a bit. That's what's sinking in to me. There will be a lot of cool modeling, at best. At worst, they might now show their modeling as much as I want to see. For the next decade there will be an uptick in modeling regardless.