Seriously though... I seem to recall that Venus is right at the edge of Sol's habitable zone, drifting in and out of it during its elliptical orbit.
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).
Yes, but it is NOT in the ring of life.. Venus is too close to the sun, its surface temperatures because of it, do not allow liquid water, which is believed to be required for life to exist.
Its not about how close Venus is to Earth, but how close Venus is to the Sun.. only Mars and Earth in terms of planets in our solar system are believed to have had the capacity to support life. The only other possibility is the moon Europa, assuming it has liquid water underneath its frozen surface warmed by geothermic activity.
Your entry window would be +/- a few degrees. Come in too shallow, and the comet simply tears away part of the atmosphere. Come in too steep, and it hits square. I doubt it would shatter the planet, but anything large enough to alter the rotation could also alter its orbit. Change the gravitational balance of our solar system and EVERY planet may adjust position. Considering that you'd have to hit the planet hundreds or thousands of times to impart enough energy to make it spin 244 times faster, this isn't a realistic option.
If we're ever going to make Venus spin faster, it will probably be by using a tidal effect and something much bigger than a comet. If we could knock one of the bigger moons from Jupiter or Saturn out of orbit, as an example, we could have them pass extremely close to Venus, and possibly even put it into orbit around the planet. The interaction of the two gravity wells could easily cause the planet to start spinning faster. Doing this, of course, would require technology that we haven't even imagined yet.
That's the planetary average, right? Assuming a global temperature range similar to that found on Earth, that could put us at 75 degrees at the poles, and 175 at the equator. With air conditioning, everything 125 and below would be habitable, giving us a planet that would support human life over most of its surface.
Venus will never be habitable for many various reasons, but location isn't one of them.
"Why doesn't Earth's CO2 escape through the hole in the Ozone Layer"
NOW THERE is a Question
All this assumes your Venus has the CO2 level we now have on Earth. If your hypothetical Venus has lower CO2 levels, it will be much cooler.
If it has minimal levels necessary for photosynthesis (about 10 ppm), the global average temperature will be around 300 Kelvin / 81 Fahrenheit.
True, but I've always made the assumption that anyone attempting terraforming of Venus in the distant future would also like to grow crops and plant shade trees. Larger plants like these require a higher atmospheric CO2 level. It's an interesting point though...I wonder where the "balance" would be, and how low we could actually drop the CO2 levels before agriculture lost its viability.
No I haven't. What's it about?
With the same atmosphere as Earth Venus would have had an average temperature of about 40 Celsius. With that average temperature life can exist around the poles, but probably not around equator. People live under this conditions on Earth. Its Venus thick atmosphere of Carbon Dioxide that have warned Venus up to todays temperature. Mercury is a colder planet than Venus although it orbits a lot closer than Venus
Conservatives should also be aware that many postings on FR are somewhat sarcastic in nature. To have to point out sarcasm dulls its edge.
that will only work if they get the relevant construction permits from the venusians...
Maybe because it is ~30,000,000 miles closer to the sun?
Well said.
Yeah, who 'da thunk?
.72 * .72 = .5184
1 / .5184 = 1.929
Carl Sagan & Immanuel Velikovsky (snip)
Book announcement
Preface
Dr. Carl Sagan, a professor of astronomy from Cornell University, a well known public personality and writer of popular books of science, in 1974 at a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) delivered a paper, "An Analysis of Worlds in Collision". This paper was later edited and presented in a book, Scientists Confront Velikovsky, published by Cornell University Press. The paper was further edited and presented in Sagan's book Broca's Brain, under the title "Venus and Dr. Velikovsky". Sagan's paper is a critique of Immanuel Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision.
Having read Velikovsky, I also read Sagan's paper; I thereafter discovered that a group of scientists and scholars had written critiques of Sagan's analysis. After reading these criticisms I began a search of the literature and over a period of time I became convinced that Sagan's critique lacked substance. Most surprising was the number of statements made by Sagan that proved to be clearly untrue. Further reading reinforced this discovery of the glaringly unscientific and unscholarly quality of Sagan's paper. What was much worse, was that it was difficult to imagine that even Sagan was unaware of the misrepresentation of evidence presented as scholarly criticism by him and offered to the public...
http://www.velikovskian.com/sagan.htm
Venus RADIATES more heat than it receives... ergo it is not hot due to energy received fron the sun... ergo, it is not hot due to "global warming" gone wild. There has to be another reason.
Before we sent below-cloud-top probes to Venus only ONE person predicted the temperature AND the composition of the atmosphere AND the atmospheric pressure of Venus... Immanuel Velikovsky.
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