Posted on 10/18/2005 10:29:27 AM PDT by Dr._Joseph_Warren
Venus Express set for liftoff
Venus Express, the European Space Agency's first mission to explore Earth's closest neighbour, will be launched next Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The ESA gave the prospective launch time as 0443 GMT.
The 1.27-tonne unmanned spacecraft, which will be taken aloft by a Russian-made Soyuz-Fregat rocket, is expected to arrive at Venus on April 6.
Venus Express, equipped with seven instruments, is intended to map the Venusian surface and weather system, looking at temperature variation, cloud formations, wind speeds and gas composition.
Its main goal is to help understand why Venus fell prey to runaway global warming.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is similar in size, mass and age to Earth, but the two planets are otherwise quite different.
The so-called Morning Star has clouds of suffocating gas driven by hurricane-force winds, as well as a surface pressure and temperature high enough to crush and melt steel.
Venus Express is a sister to Mars Express, an orbiter that is now circling the Red Planet.
Further information is available on (www.esa.int).
Oh, I don't know.
Maybe because it is ~30,000,000 miles closer to the sun?
Bush did it!®
Wow, talk about great minds thinking alike! That was going to be my answer!
For the same reason Pluto "fell prey" to planetary cooling ;)
American Capitalist Imperialism extended all the way to Venus. Facinating!
Too many SUV's!
Woah, humans lived on Venus?
actually, only stupid people fall prey to global warming...
They might find the bones of evil white men with flannel shirts.
Global Warning? Who issued it? The Federation?
Blaming all that heat on the sun is taking the easy way out!
Yeah and the Sun is Global Warmest. What the hell did the Capitalists do there?!
Evidently a case of "Fire and Fregat"...
"why Venus fell prey to runaway global warming. "
Must have been all the darn cars and factories
Question: ... why Venus fell prey to runaway global warming(?)
Answer: Venus is the second planet from the Sun.
Halliburton gets no-bid contract to decrease sun's output by 40% to rectify problem...
Film at 11.
The ESA apparently has their heads stuck in Uranus.
Not only humans, but greedy, capitalist, SUV driving humans!
The use of the phrase "global warming" is unfortunate -
"a runaway greenhouse effect" would more succinctly describe the interesting thing about the temperature of Venus.
Venus is 100's of degrees hotter than would be predicted solely by its distance from the sun. This is caused by its dense atmosphere of over 90% CO2. This was discovered in the 1970s (Carl Sagan is a famous contributor) and is not controversial.
Interestingly, it is thought that it was once much cooler, but that the positive feedback produced by increased temperatures from atmospheric CO2 caused more CO2 to be released from surface minerals, accelerating the process.
Why doesn't Earth's C02 escape through the hole in the Ozone Layer?
AND THE POINT?
Considering a 30% albedo, 70% liquid oceans and almost the exact size of earth. What would the temperature be ona hypothetical second planet from the sun? Is Venus even in the habitable zone for Sol?
Who says ..?? Maybe global warming did them in ..??
>Why doesn't Earth's C02 escape through the hole in the Ozone Layer?
Well, one obvious answer is that CO2 is heavier than air?
Conservatives should avoid falling into the trap of projecting specific skepticism on global warming caused by industrial CO2 emissions into a general skepticism, ignorance or disdain for basic science, and especially avoid saying things that a smart 12 year old might laugh at.
The interesting thing, though, is that it's surface temperature is quite a bit higher than Mercury's.
Is Karl Rove's Evil Weather Machine® involved, somehow?....:)
I just thought it is interesting. Aren't people interested in the universe around them? Its relevance to earth is not especially strong, since the earth is not going to have no water and a dense almost-all CO2 atmopshere any time soon.
Kinda makes you wonder what you could do with Venus if you could introduce some kind of fungus/bacteria into its upper atomsphere that would help re-entrain some of that carbon.
Mercury signed the Kyoto Treaty?....:)
Lack of water would be the problem.
We're really lucky to have our plants here. Though it's thought that they might have near destroyed the planet's life at least once (1: by almost freezing it solid permanently when they wiped out our atmopheric methane (a heavy greenhouse gas) by producing free oxygen, and 2: just by introducing so much of the dealdly oxygen molecule in the atmosphere when other life wasn't adapted to it).
Goddess of love.
I appreciate you bringing some actual science discussion to this thread.
I initiated it as a light-hearted jab at the author's choice of politically charged terminology.
However, its good to see someone actually provide the type of valuable information that is usually missing in these MSM articles.
Are there any realistic connection or lessons that can be derived about Earth from studying Venus' environment?
Hot flashes?
"Its main goal is to help understand why Venus fell prey to runaway global warming."
Wow, that global warming monster lies in wait, preying on innocent planets.
Maybe next they can help understand why stuff falls down instead of sideways.
Hydrogen sulfide and Carbon Dioxide. Re-entrain the carbon. Free up the sulfur. Let nature take it's course.
What's a mere 30,000,000 miles between friends??
p.s. Just because Venus has been scorched by the sun for millions of years doesn't mean it's not all BUSH'S FAULT!!
Since almost everybody is just talking over their head now I will clarify. Venuses distance from the sun would have made it habitat able if it had the same build up of the atmosphere as the earth. The average temperature on earth is 13 Celsius and the average temperature on Venus would have been 40 Celsius. Because of the atmosphere density of Venus heat gets trapped and global warming occurs. So now the temperature is 500 Celsius
> Are there any realistic connection or lessons that can be derived about Earth from studying Venus' environment?
I guess I'd say that the real worry about any climate changes are the positive feedback loops. There are positive feedback loops present on earth and venus's climates that can act to tip things in a catastrophic direction, either way, cold or hot. There are also negative feedback loops that can drive stuff more towards stability.
Some scientists belive that such events may have happened in earth's early history as the atmosphere's basic composition was undergoing large scale changes (meaning really large scale).
The presence of these feedback terms makes prediction of global termperature a lot more difficult than otherwise - if it were just a straight matter of the magnitude of the greenhouse effect being linearly dependent upon how much Co2 is present in the atmosphere, we could just extrapolate current emissions forward and know how much to worry or not worry. But instead, estimates might be wildly pessimistic or optimistic because not enough is known about the parameters of the feedback terms.
Some of those can probably be observed on other planets, though some are biological in nature and so only happed here as far as we know. Hopefully the triggers for these positive loops getting out of control are far away from current conditions, and chances are they are, but it would certainly be nice to know more.
With an average temp of 40C, there would still likely be places you wouldn't want to live. You'd want to stay away from the equitorial and temperate regions, but the poles would probably be somewhat pleasant.
It was all those Venusians and their nasty fossil-fuel-burning flying SUVs.
Ding Ding Ding Ding!! We have a winner. Venus is not within the range of what scientist believe life could be maintainable and possible.. Earth and Mars are the only 2 that they believe might... with an outside chance on Europa in the waters, if they are warmed beneath by geothermal activity.
Just spit balling here, but would it be possible to splice genes from the algae that grows in the Yellowstone hot springs with blue-green oceanic algae and seed the Venusian atmosphere? A few hundred years, and after the sulfuric acid rain stops and the percentage of O2 increases far enough, we could build public housing...
Actually, nobody here has yet mentioned the biggest reason why Venus is overheated, and why terraforming would never work. Venus is practically tide locked to the Sun. A year on Venus is 224 Earth-days long. A DAY on Venus is 243 Earth-days long. This means one day lasts longer than one year. Without actually doing the math, this also means that if you watched the sun rise on one Venusian horizon, it would take almost 13 Earth-years for it to trek across the sky and set on the other horizon. Since its poles have no appreciable tilt and the planet has no seasons, the surface essentially superheated.
Venus is actually located within the band of our solar system that could, theoretically, support human life. If we could thin out the atmosphere and speed up its spin rate, Venus could eventually have large habitable zones with shirtsleeve weather at the poles (the equator would be a vast desert). Since the mechanics of changing the rotational rate of a planet are so far beyond us that even thinking about it is laughable, we realistically have to conclude that it will never be populated.
Oh, and one other scientific oddity. Venus isn't perfectly tide locked with the Sun, but it IS tide locked with the EARTH. Our gravity doesn't effect the planet enough to tide lock it, so most scientists write it off as coincidence. We can't see it through the clouds, but whenever we look at Venus, the same side of the planet is facing us. (Personally, I think there's a reason for that...both the odd rotation of Venus and the formation of our own tide locked moon seem to have resulted from huge impacts. My suspicion is that the impacts occurred simultaneously, or that Venus may have been involved with the impact itself).
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