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

fp

[Elitist_Phoenix]

I'd give venus a probing with my "first post"

From the article

[Wellington Grey]

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

Venus Express

[Anonymous Coward]

Who chooses these names? 'Venus Express' sounds like the name of a low class Berlin nightclub.

Re:Moons

[jolyonr]

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

Proof!

[aussie_a]

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!

Re:Moons

[khayman80]

I 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?

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

[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

Re:Moons

[SigILL]

I remember an old theory that the moon keeps Earth from boiling over by sweeping away much of the atmosphere over time.

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.

Global warming and the Republican Denial

[iendedi]

And oh, is the Republican Party responsible for Global Warming now? That is such a tired cliche.

I don't think he was implying that the Republican Party is in any way responsible for global warming. I believe he was implying that the Republican Party is responsible for denying that there is any such thing as global warming. And yes, that denial is very tired even if it is cliche.

Has arrived

[Zoxed]

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

Europe Scores new Planetary Success

Re:Global warming, beside the point

[BigDogCH]

"Yet global warming is a fact, no-one disputes that (anymore)."

That is what I thought too, then I took a little survey. Very few of my coworkers, none of our distributors, and few of my family members believe it is happening.

One distributor said something which everyone really agreed with. "I can't imagine our temperature measurements from 100 years ago were all that accurate. What did they do, stick a thermometer down in a hole, light a match to read it, and estimate the temperature?"

I have no idea what the hole was for, but everyone seemed to agree with him. Plus, anyone who sees global warming for what it really is, is chastized as some crazy person, an untrue American, and a probably a terrorist.

I have tried clouding the issues with facts and figures, but they seem meaningless. I would guess it is just denial, so they don't have to feel guilty for driving their SUV's and Minivans over an hour to work.

Obligatory statement about Earth climate change

[amightywind]

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?

Why don't we have

[slapout]

permanent satellites orbiting all the planets and giving us constant feedback?

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.