Slashdot Mirror
Venus Probe Set to Reach Target
Accommodate Students writes "The BBC is reporting on the first space mission to Venus in a decade, which is about to reach its target. From the article: 'On Tuesday morning, a European robotic craft will perform a 50-minute-long engine burn to slow its speed enough to be captured by Venus' gravity. Venus Express will orbit our nearest planetary neighbour for about 500 Earth days to study its atmosphere, which has undergone runaway greenhouse warming.' If all goes well, it could shed important light on climate change here on Earth."
I'd give venus a probing with my "first post"
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
i wonder if they will sit through that 50 minutus watching.
I notice that the article calls Venus `Earth's Evil Twin'. Does that mean we can expect the probe to detect a large goatee on the surface?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Judging from the climate, we can safely guess how the last elections on Venus went like. However, Veneral Republican Party spokesman said: "Global warming is just an unproven myth".
We are also sure that Democrats don't rule Mars, either -- they haven't yet ran out of sand.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Who chooses these names? 'Venus Express' sounds like the name of a low class Berlin nightclub.
Would you rather they said:
"This X discovery will help us understand more about... absolutely nothing... we just wasted a lot of money."
Look, ma, no hands!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo/
~egilhh
From TFA:
Moons venus: 0 earth: 1I remember an old theory that the moon keeps Earth from boiling over by sweeping away much of the atmosphere over time. I wonder if this is still considered a significant factor?
Its worth noting that the moons of Mars are in much lower orbits than our moon, and mars has much less of an atmosphere than earth.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
how did the probe to Uranus go?
Jesus Christ SHUT UP! Every single science/astronomy news bit has to have this "This X discovery will help us understand more about Y." I know I'm not the only starting to get sick of this. Yeah... And I've seen enough of those flame-to-have-flamed-posts. Not everything's worth to complain about. What else should be the point for investing such a fscking big amount of money than solving or getting information about a problem that is directly related to us? People do science and research always because of that. Think about it.
This looks like a good moment to remind everyone of the amazing missions to Venus of the Russians. Sending back pictures from Venus in 1975 was an amazing achievement, and it's a great shame that we heard so little about it at the time.
It's also a good time to remember that the USA government has always made out that they do not do "psyops" on American citizens, but during the Cold War it is clear that they did. I fear that they are also doing so today with the new "Long war".
Venus Express will orbit our nearest planetary neighbour for about 500 Earth days to study its atmosphere, which has undergone runaway greenhouse warming.
So if we don't find any SUVs on Venus, then we'll know once and for all that they DON'T cause greenhouse warming!
I am not saying that research has no point or use, I'm just tired of reading this stupid sentence in every science-related articles, reporters have nothing to say and can't bother giving real explanations so they say "this is going to help us understand X."
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
more info can be found at the European Space Agency's websitet ml
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/index.h
and of course, at wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Express
The REAL purpose of the probe is to check for suspected al Qaeda bases on Venus. Osama Bin Ladin is supposed to be hiding his WMDs there.
I've heard a variety of theories that the cloudy sky of Venus may have conditions that could possibly support bacterial/microscopic life (in this case "extremophiles").
I wonder of Venus Express will ever sample the Venusian atmosphere to see -- perhaps as an "Extended Extended Mission" as they deorbit the probe years from now.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
While I hope I am not the only one to hope this, but I do hope that this new probe might shed some light on the possibility of life in the upper atmosphere of Venus. I seem tor ecall a few space.com astrobiology articles on how the upper astmosphere without its crushing presures and temperatures might be a cradle for micro-life. I know that Venus is not the only body in the solar system that might hold life, I guess Lo and Europa and Titan also hold the possibility with their large amounts if water, but I do hope they can spark more interest in looking into the solar system and beyond.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
"Science: Venus Probe Set to Reach Target"
there is a wal-mart near the target store in my neighborhood
s/Set to reach/Has reached it's/
Europe Scores new Planetary Success
What causes global warming is totally beside the point!
Yet global warming is a fact, no-one disputes that (anymore). What are we going to do about it? In addition, oil is going to become harder and harder to extract. It IS a finite resource.
Right now we are looking at massive future crop failures. Massive hunger even in western countries.
Large scale flooding of important cities and centers of production, disruption to transportation and communication.
We should be planning for these, stockpiling food, re-thinking food production, massively reducing oil consumption (we'll need it later) and building flood protection.
The POINT is, none of this is POLITICALLY, or more importantly ECONOMICALLY possible right now.
And that is what we should be worrying about right now.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Does anyone know what the daytime / nighttime temperature variations are on Venus? How long, taking into account axial rotation and rotation around the Sun, is the venusian day and venusian night at different points on Venus?
Are there regions in perpetual darkness or perpetual light? Is it possible that there are areas that are much lower temperature? Or perhaps a moving seasonal band of low temperature following the rotational cycle of the planet?
Seems to me there might be some interesting possibilities for life on Venus due to it's slow rotation.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
If all goes well, it could shed important light on climate change here on Earth.
It is difficult to see how. Venus slow rotation rate, massive atmosphere, tiny inclination (-3 deg), and lack of a hydrologic cycle should make the climate very stable. The mission has a lot of merits on its own. Why make tenuous comparisons?
an ill wind that blows no good
Thank you William for defending me like that. Now, stop wanking so much.
Jesus Christ Almighty hates you.
They planned it yesterday and it already about to reach the target.
Mada mada dane.
that it got there ok after the burn :)
:)
Go on ESA
=V=
permanent satellites orbiting all the planets and giving us constant feedback?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
"Venus Probe Set to Reach Target"
And I'm sure when it gets there, it will shop to its heart's content.
In a story about Venus, a post about how 'Veneral' is wrong offtopic??
Years ago, Isaac Asimov wrote an article called Just Mooning Around that I read in a collection called Of Time and Space and Other Things.
In the article, Asimov calculated what he called the "tug-of-war ratio" for a particular satellite: the ratio of the sun's pull on a satellite to the primary's pull on that satellite. For Jupiter's satellites, for example, the Galilean moons are pulled much more strongly by Jupiter than by the Sun, whereas with the outer satellites Jupiter just barely wins the contest, making it likely that they are captured asteroids.
He goes on to calculate a maximum distance at which each planet is able to hold satellites. This gets interesting in the inner solar system. Mars' "tug-of-war distance" is just beyond where its two tiny moons happen to exist; Venus' maximum satellite distance is within its atmoshpere; and Mercury's maximum distance is beneath its surface. The Earth, of course, has no natural satellites within its maximum calculated distance.
So what's up with our Moon? At a quarter of a million miles away from us, the Sun pulls our Moon more than twice as strongly as the Earth does. Therefore, Asimov speculates, the Moon is not a true satellite of the Earth. He says that if you were to draw the Moon's orbit to scale, it would always be concave toward the Sun, and concludes that the Earth and the Moon are a binary planet system.
So the reason Venus has no moons is because it can't... then again the Earth can't have the moon it does either, but it managed to cheat somehow.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Wikipedia mentions min/mean/max surface temperatures of -45.15 degC, 463.85 degC and 499.85 degC (-49.27 degF, 866.93 degF and 931.73 degF) respectively.
Only if you're interested in a semi-nomadic lifestyle.
There have been proposals to establish human colonies in the cloudtops of Venus, which are much more livable temperature- and pressure-wise. These would have the advantage of being relatively easily movable so as to remain optimally positioned.
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
I just want to say congratulations on an apparently perfect orbit shot.
F GLE_0.html
NICE JOB ESA!
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/SEMY1SN
-Styopa
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.
Does the atmosphere somehow leak away on geological timescales through the Lagrange points somehow? I've got no idea. Does anyone know?
Some gases escape like H and He. Heavier modecules like N2, O2, CO2 do not. This talks about the process. The moon plays absolutely no role in helping earth retain atmosphere.
According to the impactor theory of the moon's origin, the moon's creation was a very improbable event.
I don't see why it is so improbable. Pluto has a much larger moon relative to its size than Earth in Charon, and it orbits in extreme isolation in the outer solar system. Many Kuiper belt objects that may be larger than Pluto also have moons. Saturn/Titan and Neptune/Triton are significant planet/moon pairs. Jupiter has tons of moons. Binary pairs are an extremely stable configuration. Nature likes them.
an ill wind that blows no good
> "If all goes well, it could shed important light on climate change here on Earth."
Jesus Christ SHUT UP! Every single science/astronomy news bit has to have this "This X discovery will help us understand more about Y." I know I'm not the only starting to get sick of this.
Your complain is doubly true here! The last probe revealed that the climate of Venus has nothing to do with potential global warming here. Venus didn't become the way it is because of a "runaway" greenhouse effect - Venus basically doesn't rotate. Venus became a furnace because you can't keep liquids on a planet that doesn't rotate fast enough to equalize the solar heat.
Earth doesn't have this problem, and in fact has geological-scale feedback mechanisms to regulate the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The fear of global warming here is that the feedback mechanisms are too slow to help on a human time scale, not that Earth could ever become Venus. 20 years ago planetologists speculated that Venus didn't have sufficiently active geology to regulate its CO2 on a large scale, but we've since learned that that's basically irrelevent to Venus being a furnace (though it's still quite interesting academically).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
According to this 2003 BBC article:
The article goes on to discuss lead and bismuth being the primary metals. Nobody's going to launch a mission to Venus to build a digestive elixir plant, but it seems entirely possible that the lead and bismuth might be "contaminated" with more interesting metals -- perhaps even in quantities large enough to be commericially interesting.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
My hats off to the ESA. In the 3 days since we first find out that ESA is planning to send a spacecraft to Venus , the ESA has managed to build the thing, launch it, cross the distance between the Earth to Venus, and are now ready for orbital insertion. I'm amazed.
Great headline! Yeah, it's usually a good idea if space probes are set to reach their target. Helps accomplish the mission objectives. If it said "Venus probe set to reach Mercury", I'd be worried about the mission planners.
I wonder if anyone in the US outside of a few nerds will notice this accomplishment. NASA/JPL have become adept at getting results out quickly, even in realtime, via the web and satellite TV feeds. Our science museum routinely holds a "nerd party" viewing these events when they happen, thanks to NASA PR.
Take for example the Mars probes. NASA puts its raw results on the website in a day or two of receiving them while ESA's trickle out months later, if at all.
The problem is too much light, damnit! If those idiots keep shedding more, all will not be well.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Oddly enough, some climatologists [realclimate.org] don't agree [realclimate.org] with you.
I said that a Venus atmospheric mission has good scientific value. The general circulation, composition, photochemistry, long term variation, are all interesting phenomena. I just think it is a shame the science results, whatever they are, will be hijacked, hyped, filtered, and distorted by the Kyotoist propaganda machine. Despite disclaimers realclimate.org is a mouthpiece for that machine which is desperately seeking political influence.
an ill wind that blows no good
Really, who's to say that Venus hasn't cooled over the years? Sure, CO2 may keep it quite hot, but it doesn't necessitate that the planet is getting warmer
It's just another term that's misused in libby propoganda. Nothing to see here, move along, report to Minitru for re-education.
And when it comes back it'll bring an alien virus that will raise the dead.
I supose it's time to change my roth IRA over into sthocks in shotgun manufacturers.