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."

Comments

more info

[xott]

more info can be found at the European Space Agency's website
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/index.ht ml
and of course, at wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Express

Has arrived

[Zoxed]

s/Set to reach/Has reached it's/

Europe Scores new Planetary Success

Re:Climate on Venus

[Rei]

*Sigh*, even on slashdot...

Nobody is ignoring global warming. Many are questioning that humans are causing the global warming.

Including only a tiny fraction of the scientific community! But of course, lay people always know better than scientists. Silly scientists. What do they know? Them and their years of silly "studying".

I personally agree that humans can have a slight effect but certianly not enough to do what is seen.

That's great to hear that you disagree with the majority of the scientific community. Now, are you going to do so with evidence?

You enviro wannabe's ignore the fact that all inner planets of the solar system are currently experiencing the SAME global warming as well as some of the outer planets as well.

BZZZT, wrong! First off, I have no clue where you get this from, but there are only two solid planets and one moon with significant atmospheres, and one planet with a tenuous but relevant atmosphere. Surface air temperatures are only being measured on Earth and Mars (we have precisely one datapoint on Titan for the surface).

By the way, if you want to look at cloudtop temperatures (so that you could add gas giants to the list), you're taking a rather silly route. Not only is the vast majority of the atmosphere near the surface, but temperatures in a planet or moon's stratosphere or thermosphere have little to do with the surface temperatures. Of course, even that wouldn't support your claim.

If you want to look at surface temperatures so that you can get solid planets without atmospheres, I don't know about Mercury offhand, but pluto is cooling.

Ref:

You guys also love to ignore the blatent fact that we are coming out of an ice age.

Peak of the last ice age: 20,000 years
Temperature at peak: ~4 degC cooler
Expected rate of warming: 0.0002 degC/yr
Current Rate of warming: .015 degC/yr

Um, yeah. That's a major factor, sure.

Maybe if the enviro leftist nuts shut the hell up and let real science speak

Sure, lets let the real science speak.

Cripes we know 0.0001% of this planet's climate history

It depends on the detail you're talking about. We know the climate of the planet 4.5 billion years ago, but we can't tell you how much it changed from year to year, or even millenium to millenium. However, the detailed Vostok cores go back half a million years, and are amazingly consistant in one thing: temperature is *incredibly* tied to CO2 levels (which should be obvious), and that doesn't reverse quickly. And CO2 levels are headed off the charts at a rate never before seen. And we know exactly where almost all of that CO2 is coming from, and it's from human activities.

and you nuts go around acting like experts.

Don't argue with me. Argue with the near scientific concensus. Of course, that would require that you actually learn what you're talking about first.

Give me 10,000 years of daily measured data and then I'll pay attention to your wild ass claims.

Daily measured? What the heck good would daily measured do? We're talking about change over the course of decades at the most precise. You need decade-averaged measurements, and we have those for a hundred thousand years.

You only want a mere 10,000 years? Heck, we have annual data for almost that long from dendrochronlogy records alone. And yes, dendrocronology isotopic ratios matches up with that from ice cores and even deposits in varves.

No, you can not get accurate temperature data from ice packs

BZZT! You can create a concordia/discordia plot for error checking from your data because there are several independent methods from a given core, not to mention that the Vostok cores aren't the only ones (midatlantic cores, greenland cores, etc).

No, it is not a local measurement. There is differential eva

Mining metals on Venus

[RobertB-DC]

I've always been intrigued by the possibility of mining for commercially viable metals on Venus. The effort would be an order of magnitude more than mining on Earth, but some of the materials most in demand -- tantalum for capacitors, for example -- are in limited supply in politically difficult locations. Not to mention the fact that the mining process tears up one of my favorite planets.

According to this 2003 BBC article:

The highlands of Venus are covered by a heavy metal "frost", say planetary scientists from Washington University.

Because it is hot enough to melt lead at the surface, metals vaporise and condense at cooler, higher elevations.

This may explain why radar observations made by orbiting spacecraft show that the highlands are highly reflective.

Detailed calculations, to be published in the journal Icarus, suggest that lead and bismuth are to blame for giving Venus its bright, metallic skin.

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.