It's wild we have any images of the surface of Venus at all given how hostile Venus is. Given how hostile it is, it seems unlikely we'll go back anytime soon. These images were really a product of the Cold War where the US focused on Mars.
It's worth noting that Venus is still probably a better terraforming target than Mars [1]. This romantic notion of Mars has rooted itself deeply at this point (eg with Elon Musk) but Mars is basically a more distant and inconvenient Moon. Almost no atmosphere (in fact, just enough because dust storms will occasionally just coat all your equipment), the Sun is weaker and gravity is still very low.
Venus's atmosphere is about 3% nitrogen and 97% CO2. It has about 100x the atmosphere of Earth, which means there's actually more atmospheric nitrogen than on Earth. And abundant CO2 means oxygen is abundant.
We should not have ignored Venus. Its easier to get to than Mars and the top of the atmosphere has reasonable temperatures. Why would a certain type of life would not be possible under 400 C or acid sulfuric environments ?
It might be very different from what we have on Earth, but
is there anything specific to Venus current environment that
makes us believe it is not possible, with the exception it
would be very, very, different from what we have on Earth ?
I find the Venus images more interesting than Mars. Even more surprising, 30 years ago the Russians were flying balloons for days on Venus atmosphere !
"Soviet Balloon Probes May Have Seen Rain on Venus"
"The two 3.5-m-diameter balloons floated for nearly two days in the Venusian atmosphere around 55 km above the surface. Unlike the hostile terrain below, the cloud layers at this height are a veritable wonderland. Temperature and pressure are comparable to Earth’s average and there is ample sunlight streaming in from above. If not for the sulfuric acid clouds and hurricane-force winds, the atmosphere of Venus would be a comfortable living space."
Actually venus is probably not worth it. It's runaway green house gasses definitely prevent a habitable environment. I think all life needs a stability point. Doubt the clouds could provide that. I think it would relatively easy to terraform than Mars though. You just need to start some sort of global cooling by blocking out the sun.
Some languages, like (European) French, put spaces before question marks[0] and exclamation marks[1] and people might be so used to doing it that they even do it when writing in a different language.
The answer was good, but just to clarify a touch more... The software inserts the space, not the French speaker. I teach in a university in France and repeatedly instructed students to stop typing that space until a few told me they literally can't unless they switch languages in Word.
Also while life on the surface of Venus is extremely hostile, it's possible to build floating stations in the atmosphere because it's so much more dense than earth's. High enough in the atmosphere the pressures, temperatures, and solar radiation would be reasonable. It's harder than floating a ship on water, but easier than doing airships on earth.
I'm not sure what that gains us over just having a habitat in orbit though.
Colonizing other planets doesn't make much sense to begin with yet. We don't even colonize Antarctica, and it's a paradise compared to mars.
I'm more interested in setting up industry and habitats in earth orbit. Close enough for low latency internet, and trips measured in hours, but far enough to allow asteroid mining, 24/7 solar, manufacturing and refueling largely outside of earth's gravity well. Plus if something goes wrong you can have escape pods that return to earth. Having a strong space industry like that is also the best protection from potential asteroid impacts.
> Colonizing other planets doesn't make much sense to begin with yet. We don't even colonize Antarctica, and it's a paradise compared to mars.
The unique characteristic of a colony on Mars, Venus or another planet would be that it is not on planet Earth. Antarctica on the other hand has to compete with all the places on Earth that are a lot nicer.
I think what people don't get is that once you establish a human colony outside of earth ... why would you do that at the bottom of a gravity well ? Why dive into another big gravity well?
There are abundant resources in free space, from hydrogen gas to metals, carbon, oxygen that can be mined from passing asteroids (you could easily live in those asteroids while mining them) ... Energy is plentiful, the more complained about problem really is that energy is far too plentiful.
Maybe you'd want a base on the moon, but free-floating in space would work even better.
Living inside an asteroid is a common scifi trope but very impracticle. They arent rocks. Most are more like sand dunes or rubble piles. You couldnt just dig a hole, slap a door on it and pump in air. You might bury your hab undrground to protect it against radiation but you would never have walls made of rock, not if you want air to breath.
There is a concept by NASA for such a mission, it is called "High Altitude Venus Operational Concept" or "HAVOC" [0].
They also made a demo video for it [1].
That doesn't seem like a great resource. If you value CO2 so highly there is plenty right here on earth that nobody wants and people will actually pay you to remove from the atmosphere. No need to go all the way to Venus.
Even on the surface of Venus, inhospitality notwithstanding, the resources are at the bottom of a gravity well equal to earth's. It is way more viable to mine asteroids than mine a planet, especially a planet like Venus.
Mining other planets is only interesting if the market for the resource is on that same planet, or we've exhausted the supply of asteroids with that resource.
> It's worth noting that Venus is still probably a better terraforming target than Mars [1]. This romantic notion of Mars has rooted itself deeply at this point (eg with Elon Musk) but Mars is basically a more distant and inconvenient Moon.
There's a distinction there worth pointing out. We can actually land on Mars, and if something goes wrong there are options (Apollo 13 style). If something goes wrong on Venus, you're falling through acid clouds and getting cooked. The vacuum of space is less perilous than the atmosphere of Venus.
On the other hand, as you mentioned, Venus has the raw materials and the magnetosphere for terraforming. Might be worth just dropping some hardy lichen on Venus to get the process started, because no one is going to go there as-is.
Maybe something similar to what lives at undersea hydrothermal vents?
I know close to nothing about extremophiles, but I imagine that there is something, somewhere on earth, that's used to living in an environment that is closer to Venus's environment.
Temperatures on the surface of Venus are around 500 deg C, the pressure is around 90 Gs and the atmosphere is actively corrosive with superheated sulphur dioxide etc. While you may indeed be right about terraforming, settling on Mars seems like a cakewalk by comparison.
I had a fictional concept of gas mining in the atmosphere of Venus (like Bespin's Cloud City) but I couldn't think of a way to mitigate corrosion of the materials you'd use to build it by the sulphur dioxide...
(On Venus at 50 miles up, the atmospheric pressure is approximately the same as Earth, whereas on the surface it's the equivalent pressure of Earth's Mariana trench.)
> whereas on the surface it's the equivalent pressure of Earth's Mariana trench.
The surface pressure on Venus is around 90 atm which is equivalent to the pressure one km below the ocean surface. The Mariana trench is a little over 11 km deep.
If we're talking about what humanity's future off Earth might look like, it's actually highly unlikely that it's on planets at all, given how hostile such places are, the huge energy costs of entering and leaving gravity wells and how inefficient planets are at creating living area per unit mass. Orbital habitats using spin gravity seem way more likely with places like the Moon and Mercury being the source for the required raw materials.
Mars is closer than the moon, at least in terms of fuel. It takes less velocity/delta-V (aka space gas) to get to the surface of mars than it does the surface of the moon. We can use parachutes/aerobraking at Mars whereas at the moon we have to burn rockets all the way down. So mars is the easier and more dramatic stage for anyone wanting to demonstrate thier rocket tech. Venus is even closer still, but as a hell planet Venus doesn't lend itself to dramatic imagery and storytelling.
It takes a lot more to get back, though—Mars is a deeper gravity well (5 km/s escape velocity versus 2.4 km/s for the Moon). Then you are spending hundreds of days on the return journey, versus a week or less from the Moon. And humans are definitely going to want to come back, because to stay on Mars is to be doomed to radiation poisoning, and not on long timescales.
"Recent data from ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter showed that on a six-month journey to the Red Planet an astronaut could be exposed to at least 60% of the total radiation dose limit recommended for their entire career."[0]
Maybe for robots, but I think human colonization of Mars without first mastering the Moon is very unlikely.
> Based on these data sources, scientists think that the most abundant chemical elements in the Martian crust are silicon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and potassium.
The problem is separating the Oxygen from the other materials to get Oxygen molecules that you can breath, and that requires a lot of energy.
Last year some team made a project to produce Oxygen molecules in Mars using the soil and energy, with some method similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9... (Here the process use Carbon rods as cathodes, that get "burned", but IIRC their idea was to avoid the Carbon rods and collect the Oxygen molecules.) I'm not sure if this early prototype is viable, anyway.
Also, extracting the Oxygen molecules from CO2 requires also a lot of energy. Plants need a lot of sunlight to do that and the artificial methods also need a lot of energy.
What is stopping us from launching seed payloads to these planets with some way to continually water them? Wouldn't that be a way to theoretically test the survivability of the planet without sending people?
It's possible there are some forms of Earth life that might, just maybe, survive on the Martian surface in the summer season. But probably not. There are a few issues with the idea.
First, whether lichen can survive in full sun with a watering robot to tend it, doesn't really tell us anything about whether humans can survive on Mars. (Lichen is also growing inside the Chernobyl reactor.)
Second, hopefully we haven't contaminated Mars with Earth life yet. If we have, it would make it much harder to find Martian life buried somewhere, or trace evidence of previous life on Mars in the deep past. It's official policy, and has been since the start of the space era, of all the space agencies (which they follow with varying degrees of actual commitment in practice, I assume) to avoid contamination of any planet with Earth life. Until we can conclusively rule out life or past history of life on a particular world, we should probably keep to this policy.
We already know that plants will not survive in martian soil regardless of watering them. For the amount of effort/energy/consumables needed to turn martian soil into something that can grow plants, it would be easier to just send some soil. Or, skip all that and go totally hydroponic. Hydroponics makes economic sense here on earth already. On mars, hydroponics is exponentially easier than traditional farming methods.
The first habitats will probably not use any martian resources. First uses will probably be as construction materials. Then possibly as a fuel source. Those are the high-mass uses. Things like growing food/oxygen don't require much mass and so are far down the list.
> Given how hostile it is, it seems unlikely we'll go back anytime soon
You're going to be really happy about this then.
We're going back to Venus!
NASA just chose VERITAS and DAVINCI+ as a one-two-punch combo for Venus.
Just in case you aren't familiar with the missions,
One is a descent probe + communications relay (DAVINCI+) that is supposed to last 63 minutes from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom, and bring modern spectroscopy + imaging to bear on the atmosphere. They particularly want to investigate trace gas elements and the presence of organic compounds in the atmosphere. As it descends, the probe will also be taking high resolution snap shots of the tessera with a modern-ish (emphasis on the ish) camera right up until it is destroyed.
The other one is an orbiter with the goal of making the highest resolution map of Venus possible. And acting as the basis for future missions. They'd also like to monitor the atmosphere to characterize any variations such as the surface emitting water (could there be underground water on Venus? Probably not, but who knows?)
Based on overheard watercooler chatter, it appears that one of the concerns that drove NASA to give both Discovery slots to Venus missions is because of the potential loss of institutional knowledge. The people who helped build and run Magellan are retiring, and we haven't sent anything there since. It's important to capture their information and train the next generation on Venus so that we don't lose hard earned lessons.
IMO, Venus is a really important planet to study because it helped us to understand global warming and planetary dynamics. A better understanding of Venus means refinements to our atmospheric models for climate change.
It's more important than Mars, potential for life or not.
Yeah, I’d heard about these missions. One has a descent probe but I believe it’s atmospheric, not surface like the Venera missions, right? Still cool though.
What I personally want to see in my lifetime is a return to Neptune and Uranus. I don’t believe we’ve been to either since Voyager. Given such a mission takes the right planetary alignment, a decade of prep and still a decade to get there this will take awhile.
The Venus missions actually make either icy giant missions less likely, sadly. Outer planet missions are super expensive and the next launch window is in the early 2030s so time is actually running out.
Yes, it's an atmospheric probe as opposed to a lander. However, their pitch is simple - "we want to bring modern spectroscopic equipment to Venus". The data it generates should give us a lot of insight into its planetary evolution, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20170002022
They're both about ~$500M, and are intended as foundational missions for more intensive exploration.
> The Venus missions actually make either icy giant missions less likely, sadly
So one thing that's good about the new administration is that they've indicated interest in expanding funding for planetary science + exploration. Especially with international partners.
This interest is likely to be a hedge against China.
> Outer planet missions are super expensive and the next launch window is in the early 2030s so time is actually running out.
There is some good news here; JUICE, Europa Clipper and another mission that's slipping my mind. The Europa mission in particular is a prestige mission and has been actively lobbied for a while. So it's going to be interesting how that turns out.
I've got a whole rant on Neptune. Mostly because I think its temperature anomaly might be one of the most significant scientific questions of our time.
>It's worth noting that Venus is still probably a better terraforming target than Mars
This has always been my sentiment as well. Mars is a dead planet with no magnetic belts for shielding, and is just too far on the edge of the goldilocks zone. Also, if we can figure out how to terraform Venus' atmosphere, then maybe we can "fix" Earth's.
It might not be that hard to create an artificial field for it. 1 Tesla might be enough, similar to what's in MRI machines. Park that in the L1 Lagrange point.
I'd also like to have it attached to the ship so that there is radiation protection during travel. I see that more doable than planet sized protection.
Making a cloud city on Venus is totally doable but it should be noted that the surface of Venus only rotates once per year (the actual orbit around the sun makes it two days per year). However there is a point in the clouds where you have earth level pressures and temperatures, and the clouds encircle Venus on a time scale much closer to Earth days.
Absolutely fascinating. The technology that already existed in the 60’s and 70’s is mind boggling.
Also, there is something really exciting about looking at pictures of an alien planet. :)
I’m imagining talking to a person in 1971 and saying one of these things about the future is true and one is a lie:
In 50 years, even people in the worlds poorest countries will have be able to send a letter that arrives instantly to any place in the world, have a color camera and video camera that can take almost unlimited photos and that you can view immediately and send to your friends instantly, a TV that can watch any TV program or movie ever filmed, a record player with all of the music in the world, a library with every book, a clock that is never wrong, a TV phone that can call anyone on the planet for free, a computer more powerful than every computer currently on the planet added together, a map of the entire world that knows where you are and can tell you how to get to anywhere you want to go to, in one candy bar sized piece of glass, that they all carry around in their pocket.
or
In 50 years, the US and Soviets will have colonized the entire solar system, and traveling to space will be as mundane to people then as riding the bus is now.
It's not just the question of paying. There are so many movies, series, etc, especially dubbed ones, that only exist in closed, offline archives, and licensing prevents them from being digitalised at all.
You’d better add more details to the second option to make it fair, there’s a cognitive bias that leads to a more detailed option being more believable.
The first option while more detailed focused entirely on advances in computing and digital signal processing; this was mostly unknown to laypeople in the seventies. So despite the level of detail, it’s likely that random people on the street would have considered the second option more likely / true, since the space race and Cold War were front-page news every day.
Duncan Makenzie had a new minisec, and he was not quite sure how parts of it worked.
The 'Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what can fit comfortably in the human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use at the end of the twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine what life would be like without it.
Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than that of its ancestor of three hundred years earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had an unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode.
The notion of universal access to media is hardly novel or original. The technology to make it happen did take some time, but the outlines were clear by the 1960s and before. It is indeed the property and rights aspects which have principally held us back. It's interesting to note that for any printed materials, with SciHub and LibGen, the battle is very nearly completely won.
You are not wrong. Only two Venera probes landed and transmitted pictures during a limited time window before succumbing to the harsh conditions. (Other probes did land and send data but it was scientific measurements, not pictures).
This is a pretty awesome use of manual image processing.
It's amazing that so much of the exposed surface rock looks like slate. It's strange when you consider there's no continental uplift to expose metamorphic rock.
You have an amazing eye! This is actually a research question that the DAVINCI+ mission aims to explore, are there/were there active volcanoes on Venus up until the recent past?
Wow. This is a fascinating set of models. And they're about why these rocks are on the surface! Impact events make sense, but the atmosphere is so thick, burning up meteors, it seems like the chances of landing right by an exposed set of rock like that from a recent enough impact would be fairly slim. The downwelling/convection model makes a little more sense. That was what I was trying to figure out. Not an astro-geologist here, just a garden variety HN dropout designer/coder. But I always secretly wanted to work for NASA. I appreciate the kind word. This definitely sparked my curiosity ;)
You always can! There are tons of outreach communities, and good design + programming skillsets are always needed.
If you're on ClubHouse, I'm happy to invite you to Small Steps & Giant Leaps, we have regular "rooms" with folks at NASA, ESA, the private space industry and (soon) JAXA.
Aw man that sounds so great. I'm not on any of those platforms. But I wanted to share this with you. When I was about 7-8 years old, my best friend's dad worked at JPL. He gave me this folder with a thick stack of 8x10 color glossy photos, explanations on the back, from the Voyager missions. I keep it on my bookshelf. I just scanned a few for you. This is the stuff I grew up with. You can contact me @ the owner of said website.
[edit] I've been crawled 45 times by Baidu in the last 15 minutes so . uh. I'm taking that link down. I really would love to continue this conversation and just add my brain to the mix if there's some cool way to do that.
The probes were optimized for surface operations with an unusual looking design that included a spherical compartment to protect the electronics from atmospheric pressure and heat for as long as possible. Beneath this was a shock absorbing "crush ring" for landing. Above the pressure sphere was a cylindrical antenna structure and a wide dish shaped structure that resembled an antenna but was actually an aerobrake. They were designed to operate on the surface for a minimum of 30 minutes. Instruments varied on different missions, but included cameras and atmospheric and soil analysis equipment. All four landers had problems with some or all of their camera lens caps not releasing.
Not a Soviet mission, but Magellan, built by Hughes Space & Communications Group in the 1980s, did an extensive survey of the surface of Venus using RADAR.
Edit: The Wikipedia page says; "The spacecraft was designed and built by the Martin Marietta Company,[5] and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) managed the mission for NASA." It has no mention of Hughes other than partial credit under "Manufacturer".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_(spacecraft)
Hughes built the Synthetic Aperture RADAR payload.
By the way, these probes provided the data for the following:
Harry Dale Huffman [1,2] discovered that at Earthly tropospheric pressure (sea level 1000mBar to 200mBar at the top of the troposphere), the temperature gradients of Earth and Venus are identical as shown by this graph (Earth blue, Venus purple). Horizontally the tropospheric pressure from the surface up, and vertically the temperature, corrected by 1.176 because Venus is closer to the sun [1]. So an atmosphere with almost 100% CO2 behaves identically to one with almost 0%!!! Likewise, an atmosphere without any water vapour (Venus) behaves like one half saturated in it (Earth).
More spectacularly we have audio from venus
https://youtu.be/P3Ife6iBdsU
It's unfortunate we only have the audio from one landing, the other one is in the archives and is in a weird encoding that needs engineering to be reconstructed (like for a phonautograph)
offtopic: websites like this are the ones people missing when they are referring to "the old web" - see the bottom of it, C 2003-2004. It's 15 years old.
I remember I was 3 years old when my mom, which worked a radio engineer in USSR Mission Control Center in Korolev, brought me the copies of the photos from Venera-13/14.
Why did USSR pursue Venus? Surely a far harder target for success than Mars. (At least given the nasty planetary conditions). Imagine how cool it would be to have worked on something that landed on Venus. Whew.
It's a bit of a mixed bag and if you pop a level up on the linked site and go through the various probe pages, you'll find discussion of many of the issues. One mildly counter-intuitive difference is that the atmosphere on Venus is so thick you can parachute/freefall probes onto the surface, landings on Mars are 'harder' in a very literal sense that's waylaid many Mars missions.
I should have been more precise - I should have said probe flight times. The few early Soviet Mars probes that survived launch died on the way before they could reach the planet. For Venus transit the whole thing needs to keep working for much shorter time before descent module lands and the mission is over in minutes, as you mention.
It doesn't seem that transit-phase failure was a primary cause of incomplete Soviet Mars missions, though several did fail after systems (mostly electronics) malfunctioned during coast phase. Several failed in boost phase, or in leaving Earth orbit. Two of seven missues suffered from electronics degradation which either resulted in a total or partial failure to reach the Martian surface. Mars 2 & 3, both soft landers, failed for other reasons (navigation, and perhaps Martian meterological conditions), though both arrived at the surface. Mars 2 perhaps rather faster than desired.
Mars 4 & 6 both seem to have suffered transit-stage electronics failures.
It's worth noting that Venus is still probably a better terraforming target than Mars [1]. This romantic notion of Mars has rooted itself deeply at this point (eg with Elon Musk) but Mars is basically a more distant and inconvenient Moon. Almost no atmosphere (in fact, just enough because dust storms will occasionally just coat all your equipment), the Sun is weaker and gravity is still very low.
Venus's atmosphere is about 3% nitrogen and 97% CO2. It has about 100x the atmosphere of Earth, which means there's actually more atmospheric nitrogen than on Earth. And abundant CO2 means oxygen is abundant.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I