Venus
Science
The second planet from the sun and our closest neighbor, named for the Roman goddess of love, Venus.
Venus. The second planet from the sun and our closest neighbor, named for the Roman goddess of love, it is similar in size, gravity, even composition to the earth. And is often called our sister planet. Yet Venus, nicknamed the morning star, may be the most inhospitable planet in our entire solar system. Welcome to a space school. Today's topic, Venus has fascinated mankind since the beginning of recorded history. But humans will probably never visit an almost certainly will never colonize this deadly planet. Surface temperatures approach 900°F, hot enough to melt lead, this hostile environment is the result of a runaway greenhouse effect caused by heat trap beneath the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. Its global warming out of control.
Clouds of sulfuric acid whipped up by hurricane force winds blow across the surface. In fact, the atmosphere is so thick and corrosive, meteors are often incinerated before ever reaching the surface. Venus's atmosphere has more acid per cubic centimeter than a car battery. But this thick atmosphere and the hellish environment it creates on the surface has a bright side. Most of the light that hits Venus is reflected back into space. So here on earth, the planet shines brightly, even when the sky is not pitch black, hanging low on the horizon, Venus is often called the morning or evening star. Amazingly, this planet may not have always been such a forbidding world.
Astronomers theorize that when Venus was young, it may have been more similar to earth and awash with liquid water, but being closer to the sun, the higher temperatures caused that water to evaporate and dissipate high into the atmosphere, reaching the edge of space, the H2O is hydrogen and oxygen separated and the water on Venus was lost forever, leaving behind the brutal desert like landscape, windblown, bone dry, scorching hot sand dunes, some scientists estimate there may be as many as 100,000 volcanos on Venus. Similar to earth, Venus has a central core of iron and a mantle of molten rock, most of the surface is covered by windswept plains, but more than 1500 gigantic volcanos jut out of the landscape.
The tallest, matman, says over 5 miles high, almost a mile taller than any volcano on earth. Another odd feature on Venus appears to be carved into the ground. Arachnoids, huge cracks that resemble spider webs, can stretch hundreds of miles. Spiraling outward, they're like the Grand Canyon on a huge scale, covering an area's largest Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. Venus and mercury are the only planets in our solar system that don't have moons. Venus spins more slowly of all the planets, a single rotation, a single day on this blistering hot world, last 224 earth days. It is also the only planet to have a retrograde rotation, meaning it spins the opposite direction of earth. Here the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
Venus rotation is so slow that a day lasts longer than a year. Little was known about Venus until the 20th century, its thick atmosphere made it all but impossible to study. But today, using radar, ultraviolet imaging and infrared photography, astronomers have been able to glimpse what lurks beneath the planet's dense clone cover, and scientists have done more than just observe Venus, the goddess of love, from afar. They've landed a spacecraft on the surface. On December 15th, 1970, the Soviets for the first time ever successfully touched down on Venus, but on this hostile world their space probe, the unmanned venera 7 remained operational for just 23 minutes.
Since that time a number of spacecraft have reached the planet, the most recent the European Venus express is now in orbit, and will continue to send back important data throughout its three year mission, and exploration from earth continues. In 2013, NASA hopes to land the Venus in situ explorer, using a special drill, it will be able to analyze rock samples taken from the surface itself, and may provide answers to key questions about how the solar system was formed. Eventually, our next door neighbor our sister planet, a foreboding place most likely we will never visit, may just become a bit more familiar. This is space school signing off, class dismissed.