Where is Maxwell Montes on Venus?
Maxwell Montes is centered at 65.2° north, 3.3° east, in Ishtar Terra, the highland in Venus's far north, with the plateau of Lakshmi Planum to the west and the tile-like terrain of Fortuna Tessera to the east. The gazetteer, which counts Venus's longitudes eastward from 0° to 360°, gives the same 3.3° east. The International Astronomical Union adopted the name in 1979, from a list of radar scientists supplied by Gordon Pettengill, who later co-produced the Magellan elevation data these models are built from. Venus's mountains are otherwise named after goddesses: the IAU's naming themes for them add only "also one physicist".
How high is Maxwell Montes?
Almost 11 kilometers above Venus's mean radius, in NASA's words, which makes it the highest mountain on the planet. The highest value anywhere in Magellan's elevation data, 11,687 meters above the 6,051-kilometer sphere the data is measured from, lies in its western part, at about 65.0° north, 0.5° east. The western slopes are very steep and the eastern slopes descend gradually into Fortuna Tessera, and on the eastern side sits Cleopatra, an impact crater about 100 kilometers across and 2.5 kilometers deep. Most of Maxwell is very bright in radar images, as high ground on Venus often is, which NASA puts down to a radar-reflective mineral such as pyrite.
What does Maxwell Montes look like as a 3D print?
One tall massif. Framed so that about 920 kilometers of ground fill a model 200 millimeters across, the roughly 9 to 10 kilometers of relief in that view come out at about 2 millimeters at true scale and about 8 millimeters at the 4x Venus models start at, with the range filling about 170 millimeters of the model. In the elevation data the steep western face and the long eastern slope both come through, and Cleopatra shows as a pit about 23 millimeters across in the eastern flank.
The data is softer than its 4.6-kilometer grid: Magellan's altimeter measured footprints about 10 to 30 kilometers across, so at this framing one footprint spans 2 to 7 millimeters of the model, and detail finer than that is smoothed away. The radar brightness of the slopes is a matter of reflection, not height, so the print does not show it.
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.