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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 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
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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.
As far as we can tell, Mars has far fewer pirates than the Earth - this may also be a factor in the planet's weak atmosphere. We believe there are no pirates at all on the Moon.
Perhaps the surface of Venus is covered in pirates - that could explain its thick dense atmosphere.
Jolyon
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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've heard the same thing... in science fiction novels. Larry Niven, I believe. It may be true, but I've never seen any comprehensive explanation of how this is supposed to occur. Does the atmosphere somehow leak away on geological timescales through the Lagrange points somehow? I've got no idea. Does anyone know?
This idea does appeal to me, though, because if true it adds another factor to the Drake equation for finding *earthlike* civilizations in the galaxy. According to the impactor theory of the moon's origin, the moon's creation was a very improbable event. Perhaps that's why we don't see any Dyson spheres- you not only need a planet in the liquid water region of a solar system, you need that planet to be whacked at a very particular angle to form a moon large enough to prevent a Venus from forming instead of an Earth.
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.
It's also worth noting that Mars' moons are TINY. Phoebos and Deimos are 22 and 12 km in diameter, respectively. They're utterly insignificant.
Compare that to the Moon, which is comparable to Earth in both diameter (27% of the earth's) and to a lesser extent mass (1.2% of the earth's). In fact, some astronomers consider the Earth-moon system to be a double planet because of this fact.
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
No, but the Moon did slow down the rotation of the Earth by quite a bit. If Luna'd be lacking, Earth's surfaces would supposedly be battered by extremely strong winds.
It's theorised that Venus' climate isn't caused by its lack of a moon but because it's rotating way too slow (I got the climate-link from Stephen Baxter's Space, but I'm sure it's well documented in astronomic science). It takes about 243 days for Venus to rotate around its axis, and it's even rotating in the opposite direction as most of the rest of the (Sol system) planets.
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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
Doesn't the existence of pirates *counteract* global warming, though? If anything, the fact that Venus is such a furnace indicates that there aren't any pirates on there.
If this mission confirms that this is indeed the case, it'll be further evidence that the gospel of the FSM is indeed correct.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
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
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
They planned it yesterday and it already about to reach the target.
Mada mada dane.
permanent satellites orbiting all the planets and giving us constant feedback?
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When that huge impact happened, what was blown off was most of the lighter, surface material of the early Earth. All of those light silicates eventually clumped up to form the moon, leaving a body with a much thinner crust and a higher overall proportion of heavy metals. This made it much easier for convection currents to run inside the Earth's core, allowing the creation of a magnetic field. This deflected the solar wind, protecting the Earth from most of the hard radiation from the Sun. Venus doesn't have much in the way of protection: It's the moon pulling on the Earth that keeps this "stirring" going, by tugging on the surface and slowing it at a faster rate than the core.
The relatively thin crust made it much easier for the surface to crack and float around in pieces. If it were really thick, like on Venus, it would be too rigid for easy cracking, bumping, and grinding. Plate tectonics causes a lot of carbon on the surface to be sucked under the surface and recycled.
Tidal forces caused by the moon also pulled on the early Earth atmosphere, causing it to expand upward beyond the protection of the magnetic field. Once up there, the gases were swept away.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
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.
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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.
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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
You have a point. That sounds a lot more plausible than my explanation. I tried to find sources to back up my initial claim, but the only one I did find compared Earth to the much-faster rotating Jupiter and concluded that a faster-rotating Earth would have stronger surface winds. Doesn't sound like a very valid comparison to me, what with the size difference and rock- vs. gas-planet.
Another reply here mentioned the Coriolis effect, but I think it's much too small to be the primary cause.
However, there are plenty of other reasons why the presence of the Moon is considered important. There's even a book about it: What If The Moon Didn't Exist? .
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The earths magnetic field extends for thousands of miles. You'd
have to extend it more than a fraction. Yes , the moon causes
tides but at the very most they're about 10 metres. Take that as
a percentage of average ocean depth (about 5km) and its nothing.
At best the moon might make the atmosphere rise a few miles
which is nothing like enough to pull it out of the magnetic field.
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.