Venus Probe Set to Reach Target 141
Accommodate Students writes "The BBC is reporting on the first space mission to Venus in a decade, which is about to reach its target. From the article: 'On Tuesday morning, a European robotic craft will perform a 50-minute-long engine burn to slow its speed enough to be captured by Venus' gravity. Venus Express will orbit our nearest planetary neighbour for about 500 Earth days to study its atmosphere, which has undergone runaway greenhouse warming.' If all goes well, it could shed important light on climate change here on Earth."
Re:fp (Score:2, Informative)
The Soviets (Score:2, Informative)
It's also a good time to remember that the USA government has always made out that they do not do "psyops" [wikipedia.org] on American citizens, but during the Cold War it is clear that they did. I fear that they are also doing so today with the new "Long war" [bbc.co.uk].
more info (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/index.h
and of course, at wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Express [wikipedia.org]
Re:The Soviets (Score:2, Informative)
very interesting post pubjames. It seems like the soviets were obsessed with Venus, 16 probes for god sakes!
We should point out that these missions preceded the viking missions to Mars, thus they were the first landings on another planet.
Has arrived (Score:3, Informative)
Europe Scores new Planetary Success [esa.int]
Re:Climate on Venus (Score:1, Informative)
As for climate data, we have climate data for 10% of the planets history, no, you don't want to know how and yes it is only mean temperatures over longer periods of time. However we do have roughly year on year data for the last tenthousand years though through various ways and it probably can be extended back for some millions of years I suppose, considering some of the methodologies are relatively robust.
Anycase, I do hope some people will finally pay attention to the reality of data instead of constantly calling up the same old wrong idea of just having the last hundred years of weather data, or are you a troll? I suppose that is also possible.
Re:The Soviets (Score:3, Informative)
Only when their first probe was crushed/cooked on descent, they realized that conditions there weren't that friendly after all.
grats! (Score:3, Informative)
NICE JOB ESA!
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/SEMY1SN
Pictures from the surface of venus (Score:2, Informative)
Venera 9 [mentallandscape.com] sent image telemetry for 50 minutes. It scanned 174 of the panorama from left to right, and then 124 scanning right to left.
They drilled, photographed, and used penetrometers on the surface. Each mission lasts a few hours to days before the atmosphere crumples the spacecraft like a soda can due to the pressure. Much different than life on Mars!
Re:Climate on Venus (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody is ignoring global warming. Many are questioning that humans are causing the global warming.
Including only a tiny fraction of the scientific community! But of course, lay people always know better than scientists. Silly scientists. What do they know? Them and their years of silly "studying".
I personally agree that humans can have a slight effect but certianly not enough to do what is seen.
That's great to hear that you disagree with the majority of the scientific community. Now, are you going to do so with evidence?
You enviro wannabe's ignore the fact that all inner planets of the solar system are currently experiencing the SAME global warming as well as some of the outer planets as well.
BZZZT, wrong! First off, I have no clue where you get this from, but there are only two solid planets and one moon with significant atmospheres, and one planet with a tenuous but relevant atmosphere. Surface air temperatures are only being measured on Earth and Mars (we have precisely one datapoint on Titan for the surface).
By the way, if you want to look at cloudtop temperatures (so that you could add gas giants to the list), you're taking a rather silly route. Not only is the vast majority of the atmosphere near the surface, but temperatures in a planet or moon's stratosphere or thermosphere have little to do with the surface temperatures. Of course, even that wouldn't support your claim.
If you want to look at surface temperatures so that you can get solid planets without atmospheres, I don't know about Mercury offhand, but pluto is cooling.
Ref:
You guys also love to ignore the blatent fact that we are coming out of an ice age.
Peak of the last ice age: 20,000 years
Temperature at peak: ~4 degC cooler
Expected rate of warming: 0.0002 degC/yr
Current Rate of warming:
Um, yeah. That's a major factor, sure.
Maybe if the enviro leftist nuts shut the hell up and let real science speak
Sure, lets let the real science speak [wikipedia.org].
Cripes we know 0.0001% of this planet's climate history
It depends on the detail you're talking about. We know the climate of the planet 4.5 billion years ago, but we can't tell you how much it changed from year to year, or even millenium to millenium. However, the detailed Vostok cores go back half a million years, and are amazingly consistant in one thing: temperature is *incredibly* tied to CO2 levels (which should be obvious), and that doesn't reverse quickly. And CO2 levels are headed off the charts at a rate never before seen. And we know exactly where almost all of that CO2 is coming from, and it's from human activities.
and you nuts go around acting like experts.
Don't argue with me. Argue with the near scientific concensus. Of course, that would require that you actually learn what you're talking about first.
Give me 10,000 years of daily measured data and then I'll pay attention to your wild ass claims.
Daily measured? What the heck good would daily measured do? We're talking about change over the course of decades at the most precise. You need decade-averaged measurements, and we have those for a hundred thousand years.
You only want a mere 10,000 years? Heck, we have annual data for almost that long from dendrochronlogy records alone. And yes, dendrocronology isotopic ratios matches up with that from ice cores and even deposits in varves.
No, you can not get accurate temperature data from ice packs
BZZT! You can create a concordia/discordia plot for error checking from your data because there are several independent methods from a given core, not to mention that the Vostok cores aren't the only ones (midatlantic cores, greenland cores, etc).
No, it is not a local measurement. There is differential eva
Mining metals on Venus (Score:4, Informative)
According to this 2003 BBC article [bbc.co.uk]:
The article goes on to discuss lead and bismuth being the primary metals. Nobody's going to launch a mission to Venus to build a digestive elixir plant [pepto-bismol.com], but it seems entirely possible that the lead and bismuth might be "contaminated" with more interesting metals -- perhaps even in quantities large enough to be commericially interesting.