Posted on 11/30/2007 1:56:16 PM PST by Tarpon
Venus Express has exposed the true extent to which the Sun strips away the atmosphere of Venus. This process could be an important contribution to the way the planet has evolved to become so different from the Earth.
The Sun has probably been stripping away the Venus’ atmosphere throughout the planet’s four-thousand million-year history. Unlike Earth, Venus does not possess an intrinsic magnetic field to protect its atmosphere from the solar wind, a constant stream of electrically charged particles emitted by the Sun. Instead, the solar wind interacts directly with the upper atmosphere of Venus.
“The solar wind interaction is important because it defines the conditions at the boundary of the atmosphere with space and it is a very active boundary,” says Stanislav Barabash at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Kiruna, Sweden.
In particular, the interaction causes Venus’s atmosphere to lose its gases in the form of ionized particles. The Analyzer of Space Plasmas and Energetic Atoms (ASPERA) on Venus Express has been studying this interaction and has revealed, for the first time, the composition of the escaping particles. They are predominantly hydrogen, oxygen and helium ions.
This science update from ESA says as much. News stories, you are on your own, but suggest Freepers stick with real science.
Why Venus' atmosphere is mostly composed of CO2 has nothing to do with acient SUVs or runaway greenhouse effects.
Read the full article for more.
No plate tectonics neither
Either Venus was once a gas giant, or something's not adding up here.
So I guess the magnetosphere protects the airheads in the MSM, too.
True, I was just focusing on the ‘global warming angle’. As you say there is no plate tectonics, Venus has no(or very small) internal hot center, Venus rotates very slow compared to Earth(243 days for one rotation), remaining atmospehere is about 95% CO2, clouds are mostly composed of sulphuric acid, and a host of other significant differences.
I am mostly a solar wind guy myself, an early interest of mine from college.
But that doesn’t stop the news media from displaying their ignorance and preying on the ignorance of the public with the ‘runaway greenhouse’ comparison stories that are peculating today based on this ESA PR.
Try around 90 Earth atmospheres at the surface.
That's like being 3000ft underwater.
Hydrogen, Helium and Oxygen, what would be higher up in the atmoshpere would suffer the brunt of the solar winds stripping action. This is what ESA measured. So what remains of the atmosphere would be ‘heavy’, which is appears to be.
All we know for sure is what we measure with our instruments, since no one has been there to do soil and rock studies.
Venus is about the same age as Earth, 4.5 Billion years old.
Velikovsky says it's of recent origin dating back to the time of Exodus. (c. 1500 BC)
ML/NJ
Impact-Splashers, the ones who foist the giant impact scenario upon a gullible public, for the formation of the earth-moon system, have no answer for how our OCEANS got here 3.9 billion years ago. You see, when a “mars” directly hits an “earth” you get some 10^31 J of instantaneous PE to KE, ie, a HUGE gamma ray burster. We saw this in 1994 with the SL9 comet-train impacts into Jupiter.
Thus 10^31 J = the entire earth’s surface gets as hot as the sun, no delicate molecules like ammonia or water survive. Thus no oceans on the earth, only a cooler version of venus on this 3rd rock from the sun.
Thus they wiggle, weasel and contort : Oh, the H2O must have come from the MANTLE. Wrong. Geochemists have shown that the O of H2O is easily snarfed up by Si, Al, Mg to make SiO2, Al2O3, MgO...you just get more rocks, and the released H2 floats off to space...
Oh then, it must have been a COMET BARRAGE, yes, that’s it. See : venus has much more deuterium, % wise, than the earth’s 1:6000 ratio. That then is a clue to a long lost venusian WATER OCEAN. Wrong again. Now we see that with no magnetosphere the solar wind directly impacts the venusian atmosphere, more than enough particle interaction to produce the excess Du(+ cosmic rays).
Also the magellan mission found much steeper mountain angles of repose = no internal water-as-lubricant in venusian surface rocks vs the earth’s surface continents. And too, there are some 384,000,000 cubic miles of H2O in the oceans today, and maybe 1 cubic mile of H2O in your average comet. From 4.5B to 3.9B = .6B for a comet barrage to make our first oceans, do the math; and why is the moon bone dry?
There is an answer of course, but you first have to mentally get past the I-S theory as a religious tenet(GOD SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT).
Venus is quite a bit warmer than the Earth, but then it’s much closer to the Sun, and its atmosphere contains about 200,000 times as much CO2, as Earth’s atmosphere.
Simplest and most obvious explanation for what we see on Venus is still Velikovsky's, i.e. the place is basically a new planet. V may or may not have had the rough idea of dating right but the idea of that much heat being produced by any sort of a greenhouse effect is basically idiotic, particularly when probes indicated that sunlight didn't reach the surface at all; i.e. that it was pitch black in the middle cloud layers and that the light they saw at the surface was locally generated by come combination of heat and chemical reactions.
I doubt what the atmosphere contains has anything to do with how hot it is on Venus. Since water vapor is the major greenhouse gas, we know this by experimentation results, the water has been blown off into solar system. That’s essentially what ESA measured, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Helium being blown away. The sun’s radiation at Venus’ distance would be brutal. I would bet they had to heavily shield the spacecraft to even be able to operate around Venus.
But with our sum total of knowledge about Venus very small, there is a lot we don’t know.
One thing we do know, no magnetosphere is very bad if you plan on living on the planet.
Re: 1cubic mile of water in comets.
Every comet we have visited or impacted has been found to contain no water.
Hmmm, where do you get that? NASA? Way back when I think it was Fred Whipple who said comets are dirty snowballs. Are you making a distinction between water as ice/snow vs liquid water(phase change)? Obviously comets in space would have water in solid form, it then sublimates into the tail as it gets warmed by the sun.
But positing that 1 to 2/year comets hit the earth and ONLY the earth in a barrage from 4.4B to 3.9B, containing 1 cubic mile of ice on the average, to make our oceans is nonsense. Impact-splash as a theory is a right brain/no-brainer. It can’t explain how our OCEANS got here so early on. Genesis 2:6 gives you a clue...
Now we have evidence and it does not support Fred.
So far we have flown by three comets and bopped one on the nose with a 643 pound chunk of copper and in all four encounters the ONE thing we have not found is H2O.
In addition, a recent comet passing fairly close to Earth had one of our X-Ray telescope satelites look at it and astronomers were shocked to find it was emitting X-Rays. That does not fit with the passive ice sublimation model at all.
Other comets have flared up far beyond the distance where the sun could heat them enough to cause sublimation, one at twice the distance to Jupiter!
In the Deep Impact mission to Tempel I, we did find both Hydrogen and Oxygen but only in the form of the Hydroxyl radical, OH, and that was at a concentration less than 1/100th of the amount of H2O they expected to find. The OH content released was about the same concentration that would be found had we slammed a bunch of copper into a rocky asteroid or meteor.
To cover up this lack of water, and to preserve modern cosmology so they wouldn't have to rewrite all those textbooks, NASA and the Deep Impact team ignored the evidence and held a press conference six months post impact to announce the had found water... or at least the elements that make water... and since the "water" was not enough to support the accepted "dirty snowball" theory of comets, they had decided that comets were really "snowy dirtballs" and that they had just not hit deep enough to release the water they really "know" is there. This is modifying the facts to fit the theory.
Well then, that nails shut the possibility that COMETS were the source of earth’s proto-oceans; thus one more paint-in-the-corner problem for impact-splash. Since a “mars” directly impacting a “proto-earth” produces something like 10^30 Joules of Kinetic Energy which obliterates any delicate H2O present, then they fall silent on the question of WHERE DID THE OCEANS COME FROM?
Was it Frank’s mini-water-comets that he claims to have seen in satellite data, thus adding to oceanic mass? At the rate he claims then the MOON would be bright white as it gets 5% of incoming meteoric(possibly water)mass that enters our region of space, ie, H2O clouds and high albedo. We would have TWO suns in our sky and night/stars would come only once a moonth.
In fact we know from the SkyLab mission that there is a huge plume of Hydrogen floating off from the earth. This obviously is from solar photo-dissociation of water vapor high in the stratosphere. Thus the earth is slowly LOSING its oceanic water to the solar wind. Not to worry though, the hydrosphere is 200 times as massive as the atmosphere, this H2 plume-leak isn’t going to run us dry any time soon.
There is an answer of course, given the statistical and water failures of the impact-splash theory, but it takes awhile to go thru the whole RC/RC scenario; so I’ll do that later in a private post, as you seem to know your stuff on this subject.
Thanks for the pic. There was a thread awhile ago on how some new Venus probes were going to use some refrigeration technique used in the late 1800’s to keep the probes cool enough so they could last a bit longer (I think it was still just measured in hours though).
Here’s the thread on that refrigerator. A Stirling cooler - invented in 1816. They are trying to figure it out so one day they might have a robot that can last 50 earth-days on Venus!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1925144/posts
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