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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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Perhaps this page may shed a little light upon your question.
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.
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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.