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Venus: The Forgotten Planet

Posted by timothy on from the actual-goddess-of-beauty's-in-nyc dept.

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.)

4 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Venus: An Enigma by heptapod · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Venus is a difficult target... by wizz0bang · · Score: 5, Informative
    Venus is far more difficult to land on than Mars. We have successfully sent several probes to orbit Venus, and even a few that "landed" on the surface. They lasted a very short time due to: high concentrations of Sulfuric acid (just like in your car battery), high atmospheric pressure, roughly 1500 pounds per square inch to the Earth's roughly 15 pounds per square inch, and not least of all temperatures hot enough to melt lead... up to 450 degrees C.

    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.

    see:

    http://www.planetary.org/html/news/articlearchive/ headlines/2001/venus.html

  3. Re:Amazing by kwan3217 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  4. the outer outer planets... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.