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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.)
venus? my vote would be neptune, for the planet that gets the least press coverage...
and mars for the planet that gets the most, outside of ours...
i believe one of the reasons for such neglection is due to the thick layer of cloud covering the planet. i myself would be put off observing the Moon or Saturn from my backyard if there's cloud hanging in the sky.
:)
having said that, we have seen amazing ground-penetrating technology used on Mars Rovers. So maybe some of these gears can be re-used?
it'll be rather amusing if Venus does have lives kicking under the thick cloud as we speak, but we failed to further investigate it
We know that life can exist in the harshest environments here on Earth. There are extremophiles (no, not X-Games lovers) that live at the bottom of the ocean near tectonic vents where the temperatures are hundreds of degrees above what humans could stand. Not to mention that there isn't any light down there for photosynthesis or anything of the sort.
If life can exist there, it's more than likely that similar life could exist on Venus with its very extreme environment and bountiful liquid (unlike dry Mars).
Could the Soviet explorers have found primitive life there and for fear of starting widespread panic decided to keep the whole thing quiet. Just declare that Mars is the target for the future and keep Venus missions underwraps?
It's a little bit tin-foil inducing, but considering that Venus has water which we have 'decided' is one of the fundamental building blocks of life, could it be so far fetched that life spontaneously originated there on its own?
I have been pwned because my
the interesting thing isn't which planet gets less or more, but why they get less or more.
mars gets the most because its the closest that might be able to support its own life
europa isn't a planet but it still gets points for life, however its farther than mars
venus is close but doesn't have a chance of life as we think of it. Venus does however have excellent energy harvesting/producing possibilities as soon as we are more space capable
Good luck in hell.
No, the lack of a stampede to Venus is not evidence of a loss of "advanced space travel capabiilty".
It is a function of limited resources and the obvious sense that Mars is more likely to have been, or be, hospitable to life than Venus.
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I've always found Venus to be an interesting planet, but I agree with the focus on Mars. I think one of the first major step to interstellar travel will be establishing a base on another planet, and Mars is our (closest) best shot. Europa and Titan would be good supply stops on the way out of the solar system.
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In contrast, Mars is much simpler: domes to hold atmosphere in (with the possibility of terraforming to make a breathable atmosphere), and you're pretty much there.
After Mars, there is a good prospect of moving on to Jovian moons, possibly Saturn's moons as well. Venus, however, doesn't have much to offer us until we've had a chance to refine our space-going technology with Mars and Jovian adventures.
Excellent to see old, crappy images reworked with hi-tech to reveal things the original science team were never capable of seeing! What amazes me about the images is that there's enough light on the surface to actually see ANYTHING! I mean, isn't the surface pressure on the order of hundreds of atmospheres? To me, that implied some sort of soupy and only partly transparent atmosphere. The radar map of the surface is remarkable in that there are no craters visible - evidence of extreme and recent volcanic activity I assume. All together a very interesting planet - but one unlikely to see human footprints until we've throughly explored the Jupiter system I susppect. Just how on Venus would you design and use a pressure suit that can take the rather dangerous and corrosive Venusian Atmosphere, at ridiculous temeratures and pressures?
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Look at all the problems we've had with landing a craft on Mars - a planet whose surface we can see, which isn't THAT much farther away than Venus (both are too far to do say, human controlled robotics directly). And Mars is just a cold mound of rock, with some relatively flat spots. Its not a huge strecth of existing terrestrial technology to build a Mars rover - all you need to do is keep the electornics warm, and use low power so that you can use solar.
Now, on Venus, the surface temperature is about 750'K - 900'F. now, a server room conks out at a LOT lower temperatures than that. And... did you want to build the lander out of mostly metal? Might not be so smart - it rains sulfuric acid all the time on Venus. That's nasty stuff if you're a lander. Oh, and solar power is out - that sulfuric acid rain comes from a pretty thick cloud cover.
We're also exploring Mars because it seems to be a RELATIVElY Earth-like planet - in that, maybe we can make it work for permanent human habitation.
Venus would just require radically new technology to land on, which isn't smart because the scientific benefits, while real, could be eclipsed in terms of */$ (bang per buck) on other places. And it doesn't look like humans are EVER going to live there. IMHO, the biggest problem that the space program now has is capturing our imagination - a preparing for humans on Mars does it, studying volcanoes on Venus is interesting, but doesn't scratch the human itch for exploration as well.
Um, we can send shit and people(well, really more shit) deep into the ocean were we it survives and is put unde more then 90 bars. The heat is not really that hot. I mean it melts people. But 462C is not enough to melt steal. So not even close to imposable.
I had a friend working with NASA when they were naming geological features on the surface of Venus. Since all features were named after women, I managed him to persuade him to name a crater after my girlfriend, as a birthday present to her. Not bad, Venus being the planet of love and all that -- and certainly better than naming a star (star-naming companies are scammers, their catalogues are not recognised by the IAU).
The only drawback, of course, is she's not my girlfriend anymore. However, every time I see Venus on my evening cycle home from work, I'm reminded of her and the crater. Fond memories indeed!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Exactly. If we wanted to actually colonize Venus, we'd have to terraform it in one way or another. Otherwise, the extreme pressures would make it difficult to explore without some form of space infrastructure already in place. *After* we have an infrastructure, it will be more like deep sea exploration. Right now it's like Romans talking about diving for sea monsters.
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My objection is that NASA has decided that the search for life is is the most important aspect of planetary research, because it is what catches headlines. Venus is not a likely source of life, however the geology is still very interesting but ignored.
Perhaps this is the reason why we have not seen Venus landers:
Venus today is a scorching, hell-like place -- totally dry, with a surface temperature hotter than the melting point of zinc (800 degrees F) and an enormously heavy, largely carbon dioxide atmosphere, 100 times as dense as Earth's.
I don't know for certain but I imagine that would complicate things enourmously.
Time makes more converts than reason
The reason my friend is, that everyone believed Venus was inhabitable around the time the Soviets began exploring it. Their initial lander they sent there got fried because they thought it was only going to be about 80-100 degrees Farenheit on the surface; not 3-5x that.
Your conspiracy theory, like almost all conspiracy theories, contains elements of both truth and falsehood. No, we almost certainly won't polar bears cavorting over the poles of Venus. However, Venus is undubitably friendly to Earth life. The question is to which types of Earth life it is friendly. We know that thermophiles and other such extremophiles can survive in similarly challenging environments on Earth. However, it would likely require some fairly major bio-engineering in order to prepare such Earth organisms to live on Venus.
/.ers have experienced before.
Beyond even just the well publicized extremes of temperature and pressure, any life-form on Venus would have to contend with heavy metal snow and clouds made of sulfuric acid. While I'm sure that we have separate varieties of extremophiles on Earth that can cope with each of these challenges separately, creating a synthesis of these traits would require significantly greater experience with practical genetic engineering as well as significant funding. We just don't have the funds right now to return Venus' friendship, which I'm sure is a situation that
"I would give my right hand to be ambidextrous."
In order to terraform Venus, you'd have to pump out all of the greenhouse gasses (which is what maked the temperature on Venus even hotter then Mercury. ) Then we'd have to totally change the atmosphere. Assuming you could do all of that, you'd then be able to live on a planet that has days 5800 hours long. ( I hope you like sleeping with the light on. )
It's not that hard to find information on the lander on the web. Read up on it.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/venera75.html
As for it being "stripped down", consider that they used a Proton to launch the thing, and could send over 5 tons of payload to Venus. Both Venera-9 and -10 were around 5,000 kg mass. The lander proper was about 660 kg, with a 900 kg protective shell. Put stuff in a one-ton steel sphere, and it tends to be protected from pressure. The surface temperature of 450 C is not really all that high, nowhere near enough to melt iron or steel, and certainly not much compared to the temperature during entry. (I'd say "re-entry", but of course the lander hadn't been there before...)
One interesting feature of the lander was that it was in free fall from 50 kilometers up, and hit the ground doing about 7 meters/sec. Airbags? We don't need no stinkin' airbags!
It's pressure+heat+acid that's the problem. The probes that landed we're destroyed within hours. You can make a probe resistant to high pressure, but that takes strength of material. This usually means weight. You can make a probe resistant to heat, but it'll be damn hard to keep it cool for any length of time when the ambient temperature is 500 deg C. You can make a probe resistant to acid, but the metals used for structural integrity dissolve metals. Yes, we sent a sub to the deepest depths on earth, but that's nothing compared to trying to have a lander last more than a few hours on Venus. Maybe when we perfect high strength ceramic composites we can do it. Oh, and the nuclear power plant on board to power the cooling system. ~X Random Quote: "It's hard to shovel shit when already in over your head."
~X~
Well, scientifically Venus is at least as intriguing as Mars, at least in terms of the big picture. It is much closer in size & mass to Earth, and so would be expected to evolve geologically in a very similar way. From what we know, Venus does not seem to work like Earth at all, with no signs of plate tectonics. Why not? Was it different in the past? Is it due to the different surface conditions (temperature, presence of water)?
The planet is thought to have been completely resurfaced around 500 million years ago, with relatively little geological activity since then. Why?
And the biggest question of all, how did the atmosphere & surface temperature of Venus evolve? Was it ever a place that had Earth-like surface conditions (liquid water)? Could it ever have supported life? Was a runaway greenhouse effect an inescapable consequence of receiving ~2x the solar radiation of Earth, or did Earth escape that fate due to the fact that biological activity has been sequestering CO2 for hundreds of millions of years?
In terms of planetary evolution, Venus, Mars & Earth seem to be the too hot, too cold, just right examples. Is the hospitibility of our planet due completely to the luck of its position at 1 AU from the sun, or did other factors come into play (stabilization of Earth's rotation & climate by our large Moon, for example)?
There's a lot we still don't know about our solar system, and Venus is a vital piece of that puzzle. If it's all about resources or human habitation, no, Venus isn't an attractive destination. But scientifically, it is key.
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
I think that Brad Guth hasn't forgotten Venus
The Tao that can be spoken is not the one eternal Tao
This is partly a question of energy. Rough calculations seem to suggest that the human race will be producing enough power to be able to break down iron oxides on the Martian surface and free oxygen, or to move icy comet cores from the outer system and impact them on Mars, before that many generations have passed.
We don't know much about what technology would make such things possible, but if you draw even a straight line curve from the technology of the past, such as wood heated boilers, through today (fission), and extrapolate, the time till we can spruce up Mars is only a hundred years or so.
Terraforming Venus, on the other hand, takes changing that long rotation. Even if we could strip off the existing atmosphere, and replace it with 15 PSI worth of 70 some odd % Nitrogen, 22% Oxygen, etc., the Venusian day is so long that such an atmosphere would freeze out on the night side.
Even if we can sustain a technological growth rate that may be just plain impossible in the long run, Mars will be doable generations before Venus.
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I have a feeling venus will become a lot more interesting as time goes on. Having too much atmosphere seems to be a problem much more easily solved than having too little.
At least venus can eventually be terraformed when we develop such technology to do so. Mars doesn't have much hope of being terraformed because it lacks the gravity to keep an atmosphere in place.
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One of the weird coincidences of the Solar System is that, on every planet, there is a place that is not too far from STP ("standard temperature and pressure --- more or less like sea level and 300 K). In the case of Mars, that place happens to be in a very deep hole in the ground, whereas on Venus and Jupiter, that place happens to be well above the "surface" (whatever that means on Jupiter). For you Mars colonizers, if you dig a hole about 30-40 km deep, you'll find that a pretty good air pressure and temperature will result. It'll be CO2, of course, but perhaps some trees won't mind too much.
/. post mentions that the Soviet landers bounced off the surface at 7m/s. If a "lander" had been equipped with airbags, it probably wouldn't have it the surface at all, if the bags were filled with a gas with lower molecular weight than that of Venus. Rather, it would bob at some altitude(well) above the surface, a sort of low altitude satellite bobbing along in Venus extremely dull weather.
In the case of Venus, the question is, then, "why bother landing?" Why not just build yourself a balloon that floats around at some convenient altitude where it's not so hot, below the H2SO4 clouds so you can see the ground, perhaps occasionally deploying gliders or whatever to go down to the surface....
A subsequent
[ The submersibles like the Trieste used "balloons" filled with gasoline to supply bouyancy; the gasoline was not crushed by the terrific pressure down there. Then by shedding ballast, the subermisibles could return to the surface. ]
just make a nanotube pipe and send it down to suck out the venician atmosphere.
Riiigghhhttt... And just how do you propose to pump the atomosphere? You're trying to pull it *out* of a gravity well. You'd need approximately the same amount of energy for every kilogram of atmosphere that it takes to launch a kilogram of stuff to Earth escape velocity.
A much better option is microbes. If you can get some microbes to start changing CO2 into oxygen, a lot of the O2 will be absorbed by the soil. I can't say how much (or if it will even be enough), but it would be a start.
The only problem with that sort of terraforming is that it would tend to do irreparable damage to the geologic history of the planet. As a result, the whole thing is a bit of a "give and take" type of situation.
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Mars would be colder than Antarctica most of the time.
MarsAntarctica
And Antarctica does better in the oxygen and water availability stakes.
Now, I'm sure we could build something that could go there and survive for a while, it's just not quite what the space program is looking for. The reason Mars is so popular is because it's the one most likely to have life on it, whereas Venus is slightly (see above ;)) inhospitable....
--<Mike>--
Assuming you could find a good chemical that would produce inert results, you'd have to ship a hell of a lot of it. Microbes already have chemicals to extract carbon, plus they reproduce. What's not to like?
If you're really set on the idea of extracting a portion of Venus's atmosphere, there's a better (and more feasible) way than nanotubes or chemicals. Simply look for an asteroid on a near-pass course. If you catch it early enough, you should be able to use a couple of nukes to "nudge" its orbit so that it passes extremely close. As it passes, the asteroid's gravity will cause a extremely strong gravitational tide that will litterally rip away part of the atmosphere.
Here's the tough part. The asteroid has to be large enough to have a strong enough gravitational pull, plus it has to have a high enough initial velocity to not get trapped in Venus's gravity and become another moon. Given the close proximity of Venus to the Sun, it may take awhile before a good one shows up.
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Interesting, especially in light of a previous post indicating that there aren't any craters visible on Venus.
Further to my previous response to this false assertion, this page on the Magellan website discusses the fact that small craters on Venus have been assigned female first names.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
For electronics to work in high heat conditions like on Venus, it's time to go back to vacuum tubes... They like heat. For memory, we can use magnetic cores with a high Curie point. I wouldn't mind working on a Nuvistor-based computer, or even integrated thermionics with welded wiring and ceramic substrates. Anyone want to hire a 32 year old 'old style' electronics expert?
TIMMs
That's what amazes me about people who talk about terraforming Mars, etc. They talk like it would be so simple. Even if we had the tech to move comets, etc., and the various other things we would need to do - we DON'T have the knowledge of WHAT to do.
We *do* have the tech. Sort of. We can generate enough energy to be zipping around the solar system, displacing asteroids and comets. We have even built some of the engine designs that give us that kind of power. (Although only the weaker ones have been built.) Most of the resistance to these technologies is poltical. (Don't dare mention "nuclear" as a propulsion method. Even if you're talking about using it in space, some people are whacked enough to start complaining about "polluting space". Sheesh.)
As for knowledge, most of the terraforming ideas are based on a "close enough" approach. It's assumed that once we get things to that state, then some of the more exotic Earth lifeforms could begin to get a foothold. (i.e. extremophiles) Whether it would actually pan out or not would be "the great experiment".
Interestingly enough, Venus may be easier to terraform than Mars. Mars has less atmosphere and little ability to hold more. Venus on the other hand, has too much atmosphere. Microbes exist that could exist on Venus (at least flosting, perhaps actually on the ground). As they convert CO2 to O2, the soil would begin to absorb the excess O2. In theory, Venus's atmosphere could be thinned greatly just by making it more habitable for Earth life.
There's also the asteroid-to-rip-away-atmosphere idea that I gave in another post. Personally, I'd be a little reluctant to try that route until it was shown that other methods fail.
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I don't get it when it comes to picking which planet to terraform. Mars will never work, its core is dead, which is why the planet is dead with little to no atmosphere. Venus's core is still kicking, we just need to bleed off some of the atmosphere and increase its rotation a little. Still a monumental task but doable, whereas Mars is dead and will remain that way without an active core.
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
Venus will be the first extraterestrial body that we will terraform.
This will be accomplished by bio-engineering a class of organisms that will have the following characteristics:
1) Asexual reproduction.
2) Sulphur/oxygen/carbon based metaboism.
3) Builds "Balloon" cells so it can "float" in the CO2 sea that is the venusian atmosphere.
4) Short life span.
5) The discarded Carbon/Sulphur/Nitrogen skeleton must not ignite, returning the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
These organisms will be introduced into the the Venusian atmosphere by floating, automated seeding ships. In a few hundred years we oughtta be able to move in there.
What we can do about the crappy weak magnetic field and the six month long days and nights, I haven't got a fucking clue.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Actually, I believe it may be possible with anaerobic bacteria.
IANAB - I am not a biologist, but I know they have found bacteria living in very inhospitable areas, including mid-ocean vents. Some even survived a few years on the moon! Venus is not too unlike Earth was at the time life first arose. All we would have to do to start the ball rolling is unleash some genetically engineered bacteria that would thrive in the Venusian atmosphere, use a form of photosynthesis to convert the mostly CO2 atmosphere to oxygen and sugar, the way plant life does on earth. This would cool the atmosphere, and allow at least some of the the water in the atmosphere reach the surface. (Venusian clouds are sufuric acid)
Perhaps introduced bacteria could convert the sulfur in the clouds to something harmless or perhaps even useful.
Pushing one or two of Saturn's icy moonlets out of orbit and into a collision course would provide all the remaining water terraformers would need.
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Surely you've heard of stealth technology. Wrap it up in a black plastic cube.
And that the U.S. government has more technology to redirect the asteriods than anyone who gets out there to redirect the thing at us?
I'm not talking about the short term. Look at all of the shit that's gone down over the last 5000 years of history. There probably isn't going to be a "U.S. government" 10,000 years from now. Sure, the risk is low that some group or country would actually pull this off, but over the next million years or so, the risk will add up. I would argue that once this technology, is available, the annual risk from an intentional impact will be greater than that of a natural one.
At any rate, I'm actually not too worried about this scenario. The lack of success of SETI efforts indicates to me that civilization as we know it will come to an end much sooner than that. I'd guess that within the next few hundred years we'll either find a new physics phenomenon that allows an individual to intentionally or accidently destroy our little area of space/time, or we'll figure out a way to tunnel out of this overly constrictive level of reality into something better. Either way, we may not be around here long enough to worry about terraforming or asteroids.
Eh? Are you kidding? It seems like in every other episode of Star Trek that I watched the ship's Warp Core was going to self-destruct and needed to be fixed before it had to be ejected... or there was a matter/anti-matter collision explosion somewhere in engineering. (Granted, they used the latter more often in the original series). Hell, even their phasers were always overloading and being left somewhere to explode, killing a red-shirt or to.
No sirree, I don't think people want a Star Trek technology world at all. :)
- P.M.
thats become the forgotten planet. The outer planet have
all had multiple probes in the past 20-25 years. Same
with Venus, and Mars.. well we can't throw enough junk
at that rock. AFAIK, Mariner 10 was the one and only,
and that only made 2 or 3 passes after getting a boost
after a Venus rest stop.
It's not forgotten, just shelved. Its surface is a corrosive, lead-melting hell; there's really not much of interest there for exploration or exploitation. In the list of Solar System objects to explore or exploit, Venus is way, way, down on the list. As in, arguably dead last.