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Venus Probe Returns First Images
The BBC reports on the first images returned from Venus by the EU probe. From the article: "They show the hothouse planet's south pole from a distance of 206,452km. Mission scientists are already intrigued by a dark 'vortex' feature which can be clearly seen in one image. Venus Express will orbit the planet for about 500 Earth days to study its atmosphere, which is thought to have undergone runaway greenhouse warming." They're offering some high-rez images of the planet at the ESA website.
I don't really have anything intelligent to say. But i hope others who don't either will give me the peace and just say whoa, instead of coming with stupid puns, because these are truly cool pictures. so, don't write before you view. ESA has finally made something which isn't just cool, but looks cool too, and i hope they get the attention they deserve, because their funding needs it badly. anyway, cheers and enjoy the pics, i hope this'll still be the first post
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Oh i dunno.. maybe the avergae temperature being on avg. 890F, for example?
>> Venus Express science team members say they want to know how these vortices remain stable and where they get their energy from.
If only ET would answer the phone, we could call them & ask which direction the water turns when they flush the toilet.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Just a minor correction - but the European Space Agency is not a part of the EU - and countries outside the EU participate as well.
But I really wish ESA would adopt a more NASA-like policy for images and other probe data. I hold NASA in much higher esteem than ESA - not because of some sense of patriotism (hey, I live in Europe), but because with them people like me can more often than not actually get to see the results and access the raw data (and be able to use it for basically whatever purpose I see fit as well). ESA OTOH has a tendency to release only a few selected images, with lots of usage restrictions...
It's Venus after all -- and according to the book, that's where women are originally from.
The runaway global warming was probably caused by all their yaps going nonstop, a stream of hot air about "doing the dishes," "mowing the lawn," and "come look at this cute house I built in 'The Sims.'"
And, yeah, that dark vortex? That costs $15.99 a month, billed to your credit card under the name "OMFGSONOTPR0N.COM"
Thankfully my wife doesn't read slashdot or I could so get my ass...
Oh dear God -- CLOSE, CLOSE, CLOSE!!!
Not understanding the differences between Earth and Venus... Priceless
There are some people who take the time to learn about our environment. For everyone else, there's Envirobabble.
NASA is publicly funded... ESA is funded by various governments
Sorry, you're going to have to explain the difference there. NASA is funded by a single government and so has a duty to the public whose money it receives, while ESA is funded by a number of governments, and so doesn't?
I can't say that I really see the difference...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Well, let's see
Now, if distance to the Sun is all there is to explain it, someone messed up really bad with our basic knowledge of the Solar System, for Venus is the hottest inner planet and should obviously be the closest to the Sun. No way it could be about twice further from it than Mercury.
Also, could you please enlighten us how can it be that the temperature difference between night and day on Venus is so small in spite of the rotation period being about 243 Earth days? wouldn't ~4 Earth-months worth of night be enough to cool that side of the planet? after all, Mercury's day is almost 4 timers shorter than Venus' and the max. temperature is close, but the min temperature on Mercury is low enough for high Tc superconductivity.
You've got to be a true red Republican to deny the greenhouse effect on Venus.
If you do the math, since temperature goes as the 1/4 power of the recieved radiation and the recieved radiation goes as the square of the distance, with all else being equal 25% closer gets you about 15% hotter. In other words without a greenhouse effect venus would be about 45C hotter than earth.
If you put the Earth at the location of Venus, the oceans wouldn't boil. Not immediately at least. What would happen is that the evaporation rate would increase which would put more water vapor in the air. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas that would increase the temperature which would evaporate more water. That's an example of positive feedback. Eventually it would get hot enough for the oceans to boil.
Without the oceans to absorb CO2 and without the life forms in the ocean which take CO2 and turn it into rocks, the CO2 released in volcanos (not to mention the forests catching on fire) stays in the atmosphere where it adds further to the greenhouse effect.
The CO2 and all the water vapor combine to form carbonic acid which increases the weathering of carbonate rocks releasing still more CO2. Meanwhile UV radiation (sunlight) in the upper atmosphere dissociates the water vapor into oxygen and hydrogen. Because it is light, the hydrogen escapes into space. The oxygen oxidizes any unoxidized materials on the surface. If any of those materials contain accessable carbon, you've just released more CO2 and increased the greenhouse effect.
Plate tectonics continues on for a while releasing more CO2 until the point where the water bearing minerals that enable plate tectonics on the Earth have disappeared. Plate tectonics stops. At this point you've got... you guessed it... Venus. Not that you'd be caring. You died long before the oceans started boiling.
This is what would absolutely happen to the Earth if we were to raise its temperature by 45C. What we don't know is where the dividing line is. Maybe it's 25C. Maybe it's 5C. And so we've decided to raise the temperature by 3C in the next 100 years or so.
The main difference between the Earth and Venus isn't the temperature. It's where the CO2 is. In Venus, it's in the atmosphere. On Earth, it's in the rocks. Pour some vinegar on some limestone if you don't think it can come out again. The oceans are already becoming acidic enough to cause difficulties for some shell building organisms....
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Maybe it helped. But then why has Mercury which orbits much, much closer never gotten as hot as Venus? We know this by the number of craters on its surface. Venus had a complete surface meltdown within the last 700-800 million years while Mercury has not. Radiation intensity from a point source diminishes according to the inverse square law so a 27% increase in orbit will only make a 38% decrease in solar intensity. Are you suggesting then that the greenhouse effect can not happen if solar radiation intensity is just slightly less than it is for Venus? Now that Venus is surrounded by greenhouse gases, what would happen if we could move Venus out to Earth's orbit? The heat input would only be 62% as much yet the heat output would not be significantly changed. Radiative cooling behaves in accordance with the absolute temperature to the fourth power. So its mean temp of 737 kelvin would only need to drop to 654 kelvin to maintain a steady state if it were in Earth's orbit. But I am still waiting for SetupWeasel to explain it to me since he dismisses global warming as 'environbabble'.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.