Where is Maat Mons on Venus?
Maat Mons is centered at 0.5° north, 165.4° west, just north of the equator, in the highland of Atla Regio, which it shares with the volcano Ozza Mons. The gazetteer, which counts Venus's longitudes eastward from 0° to 360°, puts it at 194.6° east, the same place. The International Astronomical Union adopted the name in 1982, after Maat, the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth and justice.
Is Maat Mons an active volcano?
Possibly. In 2023 Robert Herrick and Scott Hensley reported in the journal Science that a vent associated with Maat Mons changed between two Magellan radar images taken eight months apart in 1991. In February the vent was nearly circular and covered about 2.2 square kilometers; by October it had doubled in size, become misshapen and appeared filled to the rim with a lava lake. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory called it the first direct geological evidence of recent volcanic activity on the surface of Venus.
What does Maat Mons look like as a 3D print?
A broad cone that needs some exaggeration, though far less than NASA's best-known view of it, which stretches its height 22.5 times. Framed so that about 450 kilometers of ground fill a model 200 millimeters across, the roughly 7.5 kilometers of relief in that view come out at about 3.3 millimeters at true scale and about 13 millimeters at the 4x Venus models start at, with the volcano filling about 175 millimeters of the model. At 4x it reads clearly as a volcano; 6x makes it dramatic.
This is close to the smallest region Venus allows, and it shows: Magellan's altimeter measured footprints about 10 to 30 kilometers across, which at this framing is 4 to 13 millimeters of the model, so the cone comes out smooth and its summit soft. The lava flows that spread from it in the radar images barely stand out in height, so the print shows the cone rather than the flows, and the vent that changed in 1991 is far smaller than anything the elevation data holds.
What is OrbitStudio?
OrbitStudio turns real elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of Venus on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and colored. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from NASA Magellan's radar altimetry, gridded at about 4.6 kilometers per pixel.
Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-colored 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — takes a Plus or Merchant plan, or one credit from a pass. The generator covers the Moon, Mars and Mercury too.
Other landmarks
The night sky, too
OrbitStudio Sky, the night-sky tool, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.