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ESA Venus Mission Delayed
MrShaggy writes "The BBC is reporting that the ESA has announced that they have to hold the Venus Mission. According to the article, contamination is being blamed. From the article: 'Esa said the delay had been prompted by the discovery that insulation from the rocket launcher had contaminated the Venus Express spacecraft. "The satellite is contaminated, so they will have to dismantle and re-mount it again," a spokesperson for the space agency told the BBC News website.'"
It's good to see that they're doing the right thing, regardless of the financial costs.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
From the article:
Composed chiefly of carbon dioxide, Venus' atmosphere generates intense greenhouse warming, whereby trapped solar radiation heats the surface of the planet to an average of temperature of 467C.
Experts think Venus could teach us more about how the Earth's climate will respond to the release of greenhouse gases resulting from human activities.
It will tell us what many of us know - that putting too much CO2 into the atmosphere will heat up the planet. Unfortunately, those with real power to do anything about it will continue to aim for quick gains with little regard for the future.
I know someone will respond about how the earth naturally spews CO2, but many of our processes that produce CO2 also produce pollutants such as CO, arsenic, and PCBs. These other pollutants are proven to be dangerous. Why does nobody (hello media?) ever mention that?
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
I have a book. Men are from Mars, women are nuts.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
Interestingly enough, the mission has a pretty complete wikipedia article.
But even better are these pictures of the surface of Venus from the old Venera missions.
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Well, we are thinking about building a Space Elevator, so we could get rid of some of it that way. I mean, Carbon Nanotubes requires Carbon afterall. Then once we build a couple (cuz, you know one won't be enough), we can extract even more Carbon from the Oceans and send it out into space.
Then we could mine Iron asteroids and use the Carbon we sent from Earth to make steel. It could happen....
Is this an excercise in unnecessary cleanliness, or does the spacecraft actually cease to function normally when "contaminated"? What's the point? I never quite understood this aspect of big government space initiatives.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
No, it actually is because of CO2, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Atmosphere.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
Of course it won't. The atmosphere of Venus is 96% CO2 (Earth's is 0.03%). The solar flux is four times higher. There are no oceans on Venus, and indeed all the Venerian water seems to have vanished, possibly as a result of that increased solar flux. And finally, there is no biosphere, and we know the Earth's biosphere has a profound effect on its atmosphere (and vice versa).
If the goal is understanding CO2 and climate change, the atmosphere to study is right over our heads (which saves a lot on shipping costs). Obviously any competent scientist knows this, and so none of them would be so silly as to propose spending umpty millions sending a few instruments to Venus to study global warming on Earth.
I expect this little comment in TFA is a fanciful addition by the BBC to suit their own agenda. Pity they can't leave that agenda on the editorial page, however. It can make the scientists involved look like axe-grinding fools, which in turn makes it that much harder to convince undecided ordinary people to study the climate responsibly and seriously. With "friends" like the BBC, I'd say serious climatologists need no enemies.
Did anyone other than me think the (US's) Entertainment Software Association rather than the European Space Administration (name right?) when they first read this article? The Venus Mission... Sounds kinky when you're thinking games.
Omeg La. Rofl Leh.
A monstrously large bulge seems to have formed on the surface of Mars, largely consisting of Martian male strippers in pyramid fashion.
The contaminent has been put through a battery of tests and after careful analysis , it was determined to be a double shot decaf latte from Starbucks.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
No, journalists don't make it up out of thin air. Well, unless we're talking about fringe publications like The New York Times or The New Republic ...or, er, the BBC itself, come to think of it. But I digress.
Anyway, if the reporter could have gotten one of the mission PIs or any prominent climatologist to voice this idea on the record, he would have. An anonymous "expert" can be anyone at all. It can be any random fool with a PhD, or the local high-school teacher, for all we know. The fact that he had to go with a limp and vague "people say..." tells you a lot, if you read between the lines a bit.
Furthermore, he didn't quote his "experts," and this tells you a lot, too. Maybe he asked an expert whether this mission might return some data that gives some insight into Terrestrial global warming, however small, and the expert laughed and said "Sure! Anything's possible!" And there's your "expert opinion." Only, the reporter can't quote him precisely because it would clearly not be the same thing as Herr Professor Doktor furrowing his brow and saying "We MUST have zis mission or ze race is doomed, I tell you, DOOMED to boil in the fetid heat of its own emissions!" (Cue dramatic music...) Again, if the reporter could have gotten someone to make a definite strong statement ("The Venus Express will tell us what we can expect from global warming here on Earth, and that's important."), he would have done so and used it. Remember the Sherlock Holmes reflection on the dog that failed to bark in the night.
As for the second part of your comment, sure, extra data is always helpful, if only marginally so. No doubt data from Venus isn't utterly worthless in terms of insight into Earth's atmosphere. No one's going to refuse to look at it, if they get it for free. But pay 220 million euros to get it??! That much bread will buy a lot of stratospheric balloon missions, or open-ocean buoys, or supercomputer simulation time, or experiments in the upper-atmosphere simulation chamber, or -- but you get the idea.