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Venus: The Forgotten Planet
Anonymous Coward from Winnipeg writes "These days many of us are consumed by daily batches of spectacular images from our twin Marsbots and international fleet of Mars-orbiting craft. But we should not forget our sister planet, Venus, which has undergone significant exploration in years past. Don P. Mitchell's home page features an intriguing refinement of Soviet surface images using modern reprocessing techniques. Don also includes a terrific overview of the Soviet Venus exploration program. Complete radar mapping of Venus was provided by Magellan ten years ago. Sadly, according to the Venus Exploration Timeline, only two new missions to Venus are envisioned: ESA's Venus Express (using leftover Mars Express and Rosetta equipment) and JAXA's Planet-C orbiter. Apparently, no landings on Venus are planned - is this another case of humanity losing advanced space travel capability due to neglect, like Apollo?" (We've mentioned Mitchell's reworked images before -- amazing stuff.)
You forgot to mention the BepiColombo that will laucnh on 2011-01-01: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog? sc=BEPICLMBO
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Yeah, except we did land on the surface something like thirty years ago. Take that, Venus!
Perhaps this page may shed a little light upon your question.
Ok, correcting an AC won't do much good, but what the heck:
First, it's "Kelvin", never "degrees Kelvin". 750 Kelvin. Be careful with that -- it's one of the signs you can tell people you don't really know the subject you're talking about.
Second, a Kelvin can be defined as the equivalent degree Celsius, plus 283.15. 750 Kelvin equals about 450 degrees Celsius.
If I'm not mistaken, I wrote "in the 400-500 degrees Celsius range"? How would this be way out?
If we can learn to land on Mars with a much better track record, than perhapds will we be advanced enough to start building probes to explore Venus. But at 400 million a pop, I don't think anyone will want to pay for a whole five minutes of time on Venus just yet.
/ headlines/2001/venus.html
see:
http://www.planetary.org/html/news/articlearchive
The annonymous contributor from Winnipeg has given us a really cool link: http://www.mentallandscape.com/
Theres much more to it than just Venus - though the material supplied on that subject is pretty damn good.
Nikola Tesla; Rockets; Ion engines; lots of cool stuff. Explore the site - really fascinating stuff.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Its actually ridiculously easy to land on Venus. You don't even need a parachute. The Venera craft didn't use parachutes they just had a dish shaped structure at the top like an umbrella and in the enormously dense atmosphere that was enough to slow the craft to landing speed. However, once there surviving is very difficult, the major problem is the heat. We can build craft to go down 11 km in our oceans, and survive sulphuric acid environments no problem ... but you can't keep an object permanently cold (or cold for extended periods) in such a hot environment.
I'm sure Venus has an interesting history and is worth exploring one day. But probably not for a while. Though the pics are very intriguing.
Bitter and proud of it.
Its not even that complicated. The thing which killed all the Venera landers wasn't temperature or pressure, but battery life. The batteries only lasted two hours on the surface. Next probably would have been temperature. Pressure doesn't seem to be a problem, since Venera lives inside a pressure vessel and that worked just fine.
I have seen a design for a long-lived lander which uses an RTG (nuclear power) instead of batteries, to run a refrigerator and the rest of the gadgets for months or years.
Lots of technical and environmental problems are solved by the application of vast amounts of nuclear power
Don't forget to watch for the pairing of the Moon and Venus tomorrow night at 6:30 - 7:00pm (Eastern Time) in the West sky. They'll only be about three degrees apart in the night sky.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The problem with Venus missions is that the surface temperature is 450C and 90 atm (90x the pressure on Earth). I work for a company developing new high temperature piezoelectric materials for use in a drill for surface sampling. The goal is a 2 hour survival of the probe. That should give you an idea of the harsh conditions there.
Yes, I agree, as another poster noted, it's the planets beyond Saturn that really get neglected: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
At least Cassini is going to Saturn. I can't wait for that, especially the probe to Titan.
I really wish more probes would go to Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. I find them absolutely fascinating. I guess it's a cold temperature thing--I'm fascinated by cold.
I really hope I'm alive to see the New Horizons misson arrive at Pluto. I think I've come to the decision that I'm going to make every effort to keep myself alive until I can see pictures of Pluto. That's going to be absolutely amazing.
Not that Pluto is such an impressive planet--or planetoid?--just that to actually see it would be such an impressive feat.
What about MESSENGER, launching to Mercury this year ?
Because of the greenhouse effect
A great read is David Grinspoon's 'Venus Revealed.' Interesting, funny, and the inspiration for my lame sig.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Well, the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature answered my question, and also seems to suggest that in fact not everything on Venus has a woman's name.
Craters though are! Sadly Melissa is not on the list.
Actually, check out the whole USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. It's very cool.
Three Squirrels
Bepi-Colombo
And not to mention the computer consoles running on 20,000 Volts! Slightest bit of damage to the ship and they explode in a shower of sparks, killing another redshirt.
:o)
I mean, even using PCs with Windows I've only twice had any type of explosion. Kids, don't use a monitor right after its been stored in a damp garage for a few months... Incident no. 2 was also monitor related, an old monitor gave up the ghost with enough "poof" to fry the graphics card. But of course, CRT monitors DO have whopping great voltages
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Designs are feasible that would seal off the nuclear material in a super-hard casing. A couple of the RTGs NASA has sent up have come crashing to Earth in a fireball and have survived just fine. One was even reused.
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