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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.)
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.
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."
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!
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Mars would be colder than Antarctica most of the time.
MarsAntarctica
And Antarctica does better in the oxygen and water availability stakes.
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