Slashdot Mirror
ESA to Send Spacecraft to Venus
teeto writes to tell us The International Herald Tribune is reporting that the European Space Agency is planning to send a spacecraft to peer at Venus." From the article: "If the robot craft pulls off the complex maneuver of slowing down enough to swing into orbit, scientists hope it will help solve the mystery of how the shrouded, churning atmosphere of Venus formed and how it maintains the planet's broiler-like temperatures."
Venus once had a thriving civilization, much like Earth, but they burned their fossil fuels and ruined their environment. DON'T BE LIKE VENUS!
So let's send them all back!!!
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
"ESA to Send Spacecraft to Venus"? They already did, Venus Express launched on 2006-11-09, it arives at Veuns on Tuesday.
Is this article a bit late?
a reaid=64
See here:
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?f
The thing is due to achieve orbit in a few days.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
I just think that'd be incredible. Until everything melted.
Don't Hate, Gestate
Now that's some good engineering!
Don't Hate, Gestate
This AC comment seems to have been made in jest, but it got me thinking.
... )
Do we have any way of knowing how long Venus has been a runaway greenhouse? (That phrase, by the way, invokes a really bizarre mental image
Is it conceivable that the climate there went haywire within human history? Given the current pressure, temperature, and chemical composition of the atmosphere on Venus, is there any chance that any indications at all could have survived of a possible former ecosystem there?
Mars is fascinating for what it might have become. Venus is fascinating for what it might have been.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
At least the ESA can probably convert from old timey to scientific measurements properly.
<Mission control> Spacecraft 1, you are currently 1300 rods from impact, at a fuel consumption rate of 4 7/16 hogshead per mile. Be advised.
<Spacecraft> WTF?!
Huh, I guess now that the space rovers on Mars failed to find any men, the geeks over at NASA are wondering if they'll discover any specimens of so-called "girls" on Venus...
Who knows, after this we might even get to understand how they work...
Poor planet, can't people leave it alone. It's just minding its own business and here come some dudes probing it. Would you want that, your just bumming around and whamo! probe to the ass in the name of science.
Stop planet Abuse now!
Keep in mind that Venus averages a solar irradiance almost twice that of earth. Any water that would've existed in the planet would have boiled off to the upper atmosphere with the hydrogen getting carried off by the solar wind.
Check out http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm for an excellent archive of the Soviet exploration of Venus.
Venera 9 sent image telemetry for 50 minutes. It scanned 174 of the panorama from left to right, and then 124 scanning right to left.
They drilled, photographed, and used penetrometers on the surface. Each mission lasts a few hours to days before the atmosphere crumples the spacecraft like a soda can due to the pressure. Much different than life on Mars!
Space and Computers.
For an extra alternative view of how Venus was created, you should read Velikovsky's theory... :)
I've been reading Slashdot for years and while there's always a ton of comments in the Mars articles about how great it would be terraform that planet, no one ever mentions doing so to Venus.
... why, after comparing the two planets, do people focus on Mars? I'm asking an honest question. From my perspective, Mars has so little to work with. Venus has plenty -- too much in fact. But think about it. Humans have proven themselves pretty good at destroying atmospheres. They're not so good at creating them. And in the case of Mars, you need to create an atmosphere. But in the case of Venus, you need to destroy it. Doesn't this make Venus a more natural candidate for human endeavours?
... can't you get water out of that somehow? Crank things up with some additional hardware, and if you pull enough material out of the atmosphere, you start to reduce surface pressure.
Why??
I look at the gravity situation and I really can't understand why people focus on Mars. Really. Does anyone ever look at the surface gravity of Mars before they start talking about terraforming it? It's only 38% of Earth's! (Compare that with freaking Mercury at 28%, or even the Moon at about 17%. ) What are your bones going to be doing in that environment after a few years?
But take a look at the surface gravity on Venus: it's 90% of Earth's.
Sure, you've got atmospheric pressures at the surface 90 times greater than on Earth. And the temperature averages 460 degrees Celsius. The atmosphere is about 96% carbon dioxide, and about 3% nitrogen. Then you've got trace amounts of sulfuric acid (tasty!), chlorine, and fluorine.
But seriously
Surely there's a chance that, with our slowly evolving understanding of organisms that survive around deep-sea volcanic vents, and our ever-evolving ability to tweak natural organisms, that we could devise some kind of bacteria that could thrive on Venus and start capturing the carbon from the atmosphere. There's so much for it to work with there. All that tasty carbon dioxide! And hey, H2SO4
And then there's that beautiful surface gravity.
Have I mentioned the surface gravity and how it's so close to that found here on Earth, unlike Mars?
I'm sure plenty of people far smarter than I ever will be have considered Venus and dismissed the idea after a few seconds of thought. But why? And why is Mars, with such wimpy gravity and such a scarce existing atmosphere given all the attention when it comes to dreams of terraforming?
Where's the love and the dreams for Venus?
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
Considering how good their track record is on Mars, I am not surprised they are going to Venus.
Do we have any way of knowing how long Venus has been a runaway greenhouse? (That phrase, by the way, invokes a really bizarre mental image ... )
Almost from the get go. From what I've read, Venus has simply way, way too much Carbon Dioxide. Carl Sagan's romantic plan of seeding Venus with bacteria to eat up the CO2 simply fails because there is way too much CO2. To get Venus straightened out for human habitation, you would have flat out get rid of something like 89 parts out of 90 in the Venutian atmosphere, and there's really no place to put that much air. There've been some proposals to freeze it into giant CO2 chunks and launch them into space, or, slam some kind of an asteroid or even planet into Venus to jack the air into space, but both are so far beyond our technology as to be unimaginable. There's also not enough of other gasses in Venus's atmosphere - you really need a lot of nitrogen or something like it, like, well, the Earth has.
Then again, the Earth has an aweful of lot of Carbon Dioxide in the oceans and the limestone.... maybe we could all be doomed.
Is it conceivable that the climate there went haywire within human history? Given the current pressure, temperature, and chemical composition of the atmosphere on Venus, is there any chance that any indications at all could have survived of a possible former ecosystem there?
Well, there's one famous Internet crackpot that swears he sees Zeppelins on Venus and there are people there...and NASA is covering it up. But, outside of that, I think Venus has always been dead. Venus has a lot of problems even besides the grueling atmosphere. It has a long rotational period and lacks a magnetosphere.
As far as the earth goes, the most spectacular environment catastrophe posited is Snowball Earth. Basically, the entire Earth was frozen over with a sheet of ice two miles thick, everything died and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, for a period of a few hundred million years. It was a rough time, but, ironically, the Earth was saved by an accumulation of 350 times our present level of CO2.
What's really interesting about Earth's past is that the atmospheric composition has varied rather wildly. It is not at all automatic that we have 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen and then some other gasses. I have no idea how they infer atmosphere, but it must have something to do with chemicals found in rocks and knowledge of how those chemicals must have been made, coupled with radioactive dating. Incidentally, the overall portion of CO2 in the air is rather small, something like 0.04% (and going up). For all the talk about whether the CO2 is manmade or not, or whether it causes global warming, some facts are most certainly known. First, the CO2 level has doubled in a 100 years, and when a planet wide change happens that fast, you really do have to have cause for concern. All sorts of questions need to be asked, but the big one is, is the rate of doubling changing? Like, will we double it again in 50 years, then 25 again, and so on? I think we only need to double the atmosphere not too many times before we all die.
This is my sig.
Venus rotates on it's axis once every 243 Earth days. One Venusian day (sunrise to sunrise) is 117 Earth days. It also gets a hell of a lot more radiation than the Earth.
My guess, if it had oceans, the 59 days of straight sunlight would cause them to boil away. With the oceans gone, the surface would bake and scorch sending more gases into the air.
http://www.sunspiritgallery.com/images/venus.jpg
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Wouldn't it be wild if we'd come to earth hundreds of thousands of years ago from Venus, seeded only by "Adam and Eve" who were a bit like breeding Superman(s), while the Venusian civilization died, and the one on Earth began to rebuild from scratch?
Wild, dude. BTW, pass that bong to me when you're done with it....
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
If you were a Nazi, you'd be tense too. All that "sig heiling" and ethnic clensing is really stressful...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The Discovery Science channel is running a special, "Venus Unveiled", about the planet and this ESA program. It airs several times during the next 2 weeks.
s p?episode=0&cpi=117536&gid=0&channel=SCI
http://science.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.j
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
"As far as I am aware, we know a lot less about the surface of Venus than we do about the surface of Mars or say, Mercury, or even Pluto."
Since the Magellan probe (which someone else already pointed you to), we've known more about the surface of Venus than we have about the Earth (oceans get in the way). Mars has been similarly mapped within the past decade or so, thanks to various orbiters. Mercury is something of the bastard child of the inner solar system; there's a probe on the way now, but the best we have is from a Mariner 10 fly-by that photographed most of one side of the planet before most of us were born.
Pluto... we're not even all that sure there is a "surface," at least for half of its orbit.
The reason for needing this kind of effort to cool the Space Station, even thought it's in the "very cold" environment of space, is that while the temperature of space is very low, the thermal capacity of space is also very low. That is, there's just very, very little of any cold matter around to which you can transfer heat, the way your body transfers heat to winter air when you step outside in December. You can radiate heat as infrared radiation, of course, but to be efficient this requires a lot of surface area for the volume being cooled. And yet, of course, when you build spaceships you tend to want to minimize the surface area for a given volume -- i.e. build compact shapes.
Furthermore, in space the wretched Sun is radiating huge gobs of light and heat at you 24 hours a day. Got to get rid of that, too.
But...why is having roughly 1g of gravity worth the enormous trouble of coping with pressures comparable to those at the bottom of the ocean? And temperatures so high in a corrosive atmosphere that only special and expensive building materials could stand it?
What's wrong with having only a third of a gee or so of gravity? From the point of view of building structures, it's a boon. You have enough gravity to keep stuff in place, and allow conventional building techniques (unlike in orbit), but you can make your trusses and beams slimmer, 'cause they don't have to carry as much weight. You can build out of polystyrene instead of steel, so to speak.
Furthermore, from the pressure point of view, you only have to keep 1 atm of good stuff (breathable air) in, and a few small leaks just mean you need to replenish your air faster, whereas on Venus you need to keep 90 atom of bad stuff (highly toxic air) out, and small leaks mean corrosive poison gas in your breathing air. Ugh.
Not to mention on Mars you can see what you're doing, communicate to orbit with lasers, do a little astronomy, and enjoy the night-time sky, while on Venus you live at the bottom of the worst possible eternal gray pea-soup fog.
Finally, people think there might be life left on Mars, and there's certainly little doubt if we brought life with us it could survive there, while Venus is just completely intolerable to life due to the extreme temperatures.
That's not to say Mars doesn't have problems. The biggest, I suggest, is actually radiation, since Mars has no ozone layer to shield against UV, and no magnetic field to speak of to shield against cosmic rays. You'd not want to stand under the open sky on Mars for very long without good radiation shielding, I think.
The Soviets sent probes to Venus a while back and retured pictures. Color pictures in the visible spectrum.
m
It has a horizon and due to the extreme fisheye it is perhaps difficult to tell just how far the horizon is, but it appears to be perhaps 10 meters or a bit more.
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.ht
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
That proves it. Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.
Uh, if the men are from Mars and the women from Venus, how did they end up here on Earth? Possibly each was sent here by whoever else lives on Mars and Venus, respectively.
Apparently we humans are rejects from two worlds...