A set of valleys said to resemble the animated character Gumby and a meteorite impact crater unlike any other seen in the solar system are visible in the Magellan spacecraft's newest pictures of Venus. The computer-assembled pictures, released by NASA Monday, were made from data Magellan collected Saturday as it started its 243-day mission to peer through the planet's thick clouds and map its rugged landscape. ``It's just excitement time. The scientists are in there like bees to honey,'' said Ed Sherry, a Magellan technical assistant at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. One picture shows a 40-mile-long set of valleys or troughs. ``It's a feature we nicknamed Gumby,'' said Steve Saunders, Magellan's chief scientist, referring to the animated clay figure from a children's TV show of the 1950s. Two valleys, each about three miles wide, look like Gumby's legs. The north end of the two valleys converge into a single trough, resembling Gumby's upper body. And the trough ends in a box canyon that looks a bit like Gumby's head. The Gumby-like feature probably formed when underground molten rock flowed out of the area, causing the ground above to collapse along fault lines and create the valleys, Saunders said. Similar features have been seen on Mars, he said. Another picture released Monday shows a meteorite impact crater about five miles wide and seven miles long. Large lobes of material ejected by the impact are visible north, south and east of the crater. That means the crater was formed when a meteorite slammed into Venus at a low angle, rather than from directly above, Saunders said. Shaped like a kidney, it is unlike any other impact crater seen in the solar system, NASA said. A possible explanation for the strange shape is that the meteorite broke into several large chunks just before it hit, Saunders said. Magellan, which was launched from the shuttle Atlantis in May 1989, was to have formally begun its $744 million mapping mission on Aug. 29, almost three weeks after it went into orbit around Venus. But engineers temporarily lost radio contact with the spacecraft on Aug. 16 and again Aug. 21.
