From earthbound optical telescopes, the surface of Venus is shrouded beneath thick clouds made mostly of carbon dioxide. To penetrate this veil, probes like NASA's Magellan spacecraft use radar to reveal remarkable features of this planet, like mountains, craters, and volcanoes.
Recently, by combining the highly sensitive receiving capabilities of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the powerful radar transmitter at the NSF's Arecibo Observatory, astronomers were able to make remarkably detailed images of the surface of this planet without ever leaving Earth.
The radar signals from Arecibo passed through both our planet's atmosphere and the atmosphere of Venus, where they hit the surface and bounced back to be received by the GBT in a process known as bistatic radar.
Reference: space-wanderers.blogspot.com