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Venus Express Blasts Off
kitzilla writes "The European Space Agency's Venus Express probe has been successfully launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The mission's first attempt was scrubbed last month after technicians spotted a problem with the lift vehicle. In about five months, Venus Express will pull into orbit around our closest planetary neighbor and begin five months of scheduled observations. On the short list of mission objectives: a detailed mapping of Venus' surface, a survey of the planet's complex atmosphere, and a look into the possibility of active Venusian volcanoes."
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/0 8/034230&tid=160&tid=98
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
And this just after news about how the US is cutting down on NASA's budget and missions like this..
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
...Google Venus is on the way ??? :-)
37 megs, quicktime movie.
The ESA's Venus express portal
And a load of artist impressions, photos and cgi videos are on ESA's site here
A great day for the ESA, the data gathered from this and in comparison to that from the Mars Express is really going to give some good information on planetary warming and cooling.
Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society is keeping a running tally of events on the Society's official weblog. In general, the weblog is a great source of space science news. According to her latest post, Venus Express has already reported back to ground control and is in healthy condition.
There's also the obligatory Wikipedia article on Venus Express, which has a nice description of what the craft will be doing.
we can get Government funded missions to map and photograph other planets that place the results in the public domain but we can't get Government funded missions to map and photograph our own planet which put the results in the public domain? It occurs to me that the latter would not only be substantially cheaper to do but also far more useful to the general populous. A multi-national effort to provide such mapping would cost each country peanuts and would provide numerous benifits.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4420210.stm - the BBC has both a report and a video (streaming).
Yes, absolutely. Who cares ....
...
..... bzzt .. sorry this Kansas Educational broadcast has been interrupted by the real world.
... bzzt, back to the Kansas educational department broadcast ...
.....
In fact let's ban all forms of research
In fact let's ban all forms of thought. And art, and music, oh, and teaching any form of science - especially that evilolution stuff.
Let's ban
Research doesn't always give directly useful results. It might - or it might not. The process of doing research might give useful results - or it might not.
In fact doing almost anything might give useful results. Or not.
But backing off from researching the local area - now that's really silly. Volcanoes on Venus - who cares? Well I do, for one. Any better understanding of volcanoes would seem to be a useful thing to me - there are quite a few in the world. It would be nice to learn something about them in a completely different environment.
Yes, and let's ban the Internet, and electricity, and inoculations, and
"Cats like plain crisps"
My goodness, I was seriously asking what the use is. I was not asking "Why is such a useless thing being done?", I was asking what the use is. And that's what I'd like to honestly know. Of course I know that not all research is useful right away, but there must be some motivation behind finding out about volcanoes on Venus.
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So it's great to see a space mission that combines engineering with real science and that isn't just predicated on the public's gullibility as to the long odds of ET life.
I know that the /. 'love all things space' crowd will mod me down, but I've got Karma to burn.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
seriously, I don't disagree with you. I would love to see very very VERY high quality, high detail data of the entire earth. I think it would be incredibly interesting and extremely useful, not only for future generations, but for the current generation as well.
However, there are always people that will say that because it can be used for EBIL!!! deeds, the information should not be made public.
Too bad, IMHO. :(
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
If the human race innately took your attitude, we'd still be living in caves.
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Venus is an extreme case of climatology. It's about the same size as the Earth. It actually receives less sunlight than the Earth, even though it's closer to the Sun, because its cloud layer reflects so much incoming radiation. But it's hot hot hot.
That atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, with some nitrogen, water vapour and sulphur dioxide. It's hot, acidic, and the pressure is the sort of thing you only get on Earth in the deep seas.
Now, we have to wonder how Venus got that way. One possibility for how Venus got such a thick, acidic atmosphere is that it is continually undergoing massive volcanic activity. If we can observe Venusian volcanoes, we can determine to what extent they might reasonably affect the climate on Venus.
If we can understand Venus, then we can use it to stress-test our planetary climate models and thereby improve our understanding of comparable processes on Earth. It shouldn't be too hard to think of a reason why we might urgently want to improve our understanding of Earth's climate systems as regards atmospheric carbon dioxide content...
There's a very good writeup of Venus and why it's interesting here.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
What rot. If that was the case we'd have used an Ariane. The rocket used here was Soyuz / Fregat - a Russian launcher.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Good point. That reminds me of how I felt when I watched the tragic events that happened in New Orleans: How can it take a nation that can fly to the moon and to Venus days and days to get some people out of a wrecked city? There were certainly things with a higher priority...
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It's called the Ordinance Survey, and is repeated pretty frequently. The organisation responsible is still an arm of the british government (200 years ago it was had the functions our present ministry of defence has).
It funds itself by selling the maps it produces - IE, although a part of the government, it operates as a sulf-sufficient business - and that in turn means that only the people who need it are paying for it, as opposed to all of us paying a tax on it.
Works pretty well.
http://space.boardtracker.com
That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.
teewurstmann does raise an interesting question - "Why are we looking for active volcanos on Venus?"
The answers "Because we can." or "It'll lead to great jumps in science." would not suffice with your average Joe Bloggs though, and if we wish to increase our ventures into space, or even just continue with space exploration altogether, then we're going to need a "hook", or a goal that we can present to the public in a unified answer that satisfies their curiosity and is not an outright lie - although a little white lie like, for example "We hope to discover a significant mineral deposit on the moon which will facilitate longer journeys into space." or "By studying the metals and minerals on Mercury we can discover how to create stronger, more tolerable materials on Earth which will create better housing, stronger and lighter cars..." etc.
Come up with a Grand Idea if you like - "We're going to save mankind."
Now seriously, who wouldn't think that saving our species is a noble goal? We don't have to tell the public "from ourselves", we'll just keep'em guessing - the continual doses of paranoia we're getting from our governments aren't doing too much harm, so we'll use a little "poetic licence".
Why are we looking for volcanos on Venus? Why not? Why not start at Mercury, or Venus, or Mars, or anywhere else in our solar system and look at it like one of those colour tests a few of us must have done in chemistry in high school.
Oh look, Mercury is mainly this colour, which means it's made mostly of this mineral... Venus is very acidic, and has all sorts of interesting liquid metals at venusian "room" temperature... Mars seems to have water, or the evidence of water...
We study, and learn, and find out how our solar system is constructed, and then one day, maybe if we don't destroy ourselves beforehand, we use the models we've made from this gathering of knowledge and we create plans.
We plan which solar systems nearby would be likely to have a sufficiently earth-like blue-green planet. We plan where we could find in our galaxy various minerals, fuels, and other resources needed to build, maintain, and power our ships as we go searching for other life, and other worlds. We plan to spread out, to colonise the most idyllic locations, and make sure that our species survives through sheer weight of numbers. We plan to live, to explore, to discover, to learn, to expand our minds and evolve.
We've been sitting on this little blue-green marble for a long time now, long enough to nurture the maths, physics, chemistry, and biological sciences enough to show us how to get up and explore the rest of our solar system. Now we need to use that knowledge and help ourselves before a meteor, asteroid, or sheer stupidity kills us.
Why explore the solar system? Why pick over rocks on Venus?
Because these are our baby steps, our first tentative journeys into space, the beginning of what I, and I'd hope many of you too, would dearly wish to be the start of our much greater journey into the galaxy.
Mistakes will be made, and lives will, as they have, be lost, but those people, our first space explorers, did not die in vain. We already have gained much knowledge, and it may not be used to any large extent now, but it will prove to be invaluable in the future.
I only hope that politics, greed, apathy, and stupidity don't condemn us to live our final days here, stuck on a world we could so easily leave if we simply worked at it.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
like "finding out about volcanoes on Venus"??? We'll just learn from it, there is no other "use". You Engineer
... of finding active volcanoes on Venus? Could someone get some practical use out of such a find?
Well, the US takes Mars, Europe takes Venus, and the taxable populations get it in the Uranus.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
We only have a limited number of volcanoes on earth, and only of limited variety in type and structure. Seeing a few more of them, maybe of types we haven't seen here, might give us better insight on how such things work. Long time down the road, we might even get better in controlling, or at least predicting the behavior of the local ones.
Besides, active volcanoes indicate a planet has an active hot core, which would be interesting to know. Same argument as above, just substitute "planet" for "volcano"...
In Murphy We Turst
it's venerian...venerean
I can't think of an immediate use for studying venusian volcanoes. But given the amount we're stressing our own atmosphere and how little we know about what effect that will have, letting planetary scientists study another planet in detail sounds like a very good idea to me.
Devon
Or a google comment that doesn't spawn a thread....
Easy! God made it that way. Damn, this Intelligent Design science stuff is so easy! Can I have a Nobel prize now?
Politics, my naive but well meaning friend. No country wants pictures of its top secret places free for the world to see. Look at the whole google-spotting fun going on already with people posting up pics of bomber bases, submarines, warships etc. Lots of countries really don't want you to know where they keep their tanks, or that they've sneakily pushed up their advanced forces into somebody else's disputed territory.
Lots of farmers in Europe got caught out a few years ago when the satellite images proved that they were claiming subsidies for farming land they weren't actually doing anything with, lots of logging companies in the Amazon probably would prefer that hippy ecologist PhD students don't get ready access to high quality data. Pick your prefered flavour of scenario.
Some countries find it good not to let others know what they are doing with nuclear power. Commercial companies are doing very nicely making money out of selling you pictures, why should they want you to get them for free?
Right now, geographical and geological data about Mars and Venus are of commercial / geopolitical little worth, we can just about get remote control robots there. Wait till any medium sized company and tin pot dictatorship can get 50 people there with mining/digging/ fighting equipment and then it will be interesting to see how easy it is to get high resolution maps "of the land 10km to the East of US Mars Base 7" "geological survey of 100km surrounding Exxon drilling rig 39" etc....
Thank you very much. That was a very informative answer.
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Well, if you look at the post below, there is an actual use. And I don't think any engineer will spend time researching something that he isn't convinced will have some use farther down the road. Especially if something is funded by the government, they probably want to have SOME information about what good might come out of such research at one point.
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i remember hearing about a program that was designed to analyse the night sky looking for clusters, searching out for something...(would love to be able to reference this claim sorry!). The software was then turned to looking for cancers on smear plates. The direct usefulness sometimes escapes us. In the spirit of the Baconian tradition, we should be looking to expand our knowledge without bias. Not that this is always the case - the venus express is studying the recent warming effect seen on venus, trying to shed some light on what might be happening on earth. More to the point, we don't know how useful something we don't know about could be until we look at it.
Wonder if it will outlast it's planned life, like the mars rover.
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I guess as long as they're not planning to have the satellite return to Earth, it's all good. Remember, this is how Night of the Living Dead all started.
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
It does have a rather nice phallic look to it though.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus... Its just an excuse to check out some hot Women!
You should also consider: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/ http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ ...
And your point is?
an ill wind that blows no good
Yes they could. But they'd have to find the active volcanoes to know for sure.
Who ordered that?
I do prefer Venetian mounds, thank you.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
And no, I won't say Cytherean mounds, and Venereal mounds sounds even more hazardous.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.
Venus average surface temperature is higher than Mercury. Mercury is not backed like a cinder. It is composed of basaltic silicates, iron and nickel, refractory oxides. These materials have a very high melting point. Venus has active volcanoes. We already have detailed images of them.
an ill wind that blows no good
Congrats, you've understood the way I think Engineers think. Now go on and get why I think that's not what science is about.
If no women are found on Venus, the mission is a total failure.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Arianespace has signed a deal with Russia to include their soyuz rocket into their products range. I'm not an expert but it makes sense to use it for such mission, Ariane5 is mainly dedicated to commercial satellites.
I'm maybe wrong but I think soon Soyuz rockets will be launched from French guinea.
This is a small part of a European/Russian biggest plan to develop more and more solutions together.
What rot. If that was the case we'd have used an Ariane. The rocket used here was Soyuz / Fregat - a Russian launcher.
The latest Soyuz is a joint venture owned by Russia and Europe, though the design is Russian origin. It's pretty much the most advanced spacecraft ever built on Earth, solid and reliable, and costs only $30 million per launch. (compare to the ancient shuttle costing over $600 million per launch)
Nice to see Europeans continue their agenda to do actual science which benefits the entire human civilization instead of burning money for ridiculous political/self-esteem/military goals.
Good luck, Venus Express!
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It is not bigger, they just know how to use it.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
pause
still cloudy...
pause...
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
My question is, where are Fry, Leela, and Bender? Oh wait, this is the Venus Express, not Planet Express!
Here's why we do basic research:
http://www.math.mun.ca/~edgar/moody.html
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
A Goddess on a mountain top Was burning like a silver flame The summit of Beauty in love And Venus was her name She's got it yeah, Baby, she's got it Well, I'm your Venus, I'm your fire At your desire Her weapon were her crystal eyes Making every man mad Black as the dark night she was Got what no-one else had Wa! She's got it yeah, Baby, she's got it Well, I'm your Venus, I'm your fire At your desire
How ya like dat?
Osama bin Laden and Batman both live in caves, and they're both successful millionaires, so it doesn't have to be a disadvantage.
Suck figs.
I think you meant Venerial Mounds.
Like what I said? You might like my music
No, Venereal Mounds.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
start of a new meme? "In fundie kansas..."