Momentum is building to explore Venus

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01730-5

by 6d6b73 • 7 years ago

198 173 7 years ago

tlb2• 7 years ago

The enabling technology we need more of is electronics that can work at 500 C. People have demonstrated small-scale integrated circuits, but nothing like a microprocessor. https://science.nasa.gov/technology/technology-stories/elect...

cytherean• 7 years ago

Not really - we don't have to land on the surface of Venus to explore it. https://www.space.com/29140-venus-airship-cloud-cities-incre...

tlb2• 7 years ago

The atmosphere is opaque, so you can't see much from high up.

The most interesting science (to me) would be to look for fossils or other signs of life, for which you have to land and dig.

hsnewman2• 7 years ago

I've always wondered why we don't seed it with some biology that can eat the components of the Venusian atmosphere (ie: sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide) to make a more habitable planet over time.

thebooktocome3• 7 years ago

Because we've failed to terraform much closer, less inhospitable environments, and the risks for getting it wrong are very high.

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

Wait, what are the risks? It's not like you're going to make Venus _more_ inhospitable than it already is.

Worst case scenario is we'd lose some valuable scientific information about Venus in its natural state.

theandrewbailey• 7 years ago

Which environments are you referring to? Venus is the closest planet to Earth. The Moon is the only significant body between the two.

And by 'we've failed to terraform', did you mean 'we haven't tried yet'?

staplers• 7 years ago

Europeans said the same about North America when they landed on it.. we might want to study it a bit before making biosphere decisions like that.. not to mention the feasibility of it being possible.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

because we probably don't neither Venus nor the techniques required to make such a change, let alone the money or need. the material requirements alone would be staggering plus we cannot discount the attention span problem, this isn't something likely to be done in a life time

jacobush3• 7 years ago

You are probably right, but wouldn't any technology which actually has a chance of working, also have the property that a small seeding might have the chance of "taking hold" and working wether we remember to continue on it or not?

To be clear, I mean if someone drops a bunch of microbes, only once, and not all of them die but slowly start to mix and live in the atmosphere, wouldn't they over millennia, very slowly but also very unstoppably, eat until everything they want to eat is eaten?

ar-nelson• 7 years ago

Wouldn't this take thousands or millions of years? Doesn't seem like there's much incentive for a project like that.

jacobush3• 7 years ago

If it's cheap, why not try it?

barkingcat• 7 years ago

Because what if there are Venusians there already and we cannot afford to wage an interplanetary war.

bluGill3• 7 years ago

They might be there and we don't know about it. However the ability to wage interplanetary war implies are a lot of technology that we would be able to detect. Even if we assume they have the space ships in "mothballs", they would need to test and maintain them - something we can detect - or risk that they don't work when they need them.

m31415• 7 years ago

In Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, Venus is terraformed by inserting a large sunshade in the L1 Lagrange point of the Venus-Sun system. This makes Venus significantly cooler and atmospheric CO2 freezes. The frozen CO2 is then easily removed.

empath752• 7 years ago

We can’t even fix the climate where we live, with much easier solutions.

LoSboccacc• 7 years ago

large part of it is sociopolitical: major populated and productive countries are locked by their social and economical structure into the need of perpetual growth to inject capital at the base as the top scoop up any floating wealth, stopping the growth without some for. of wealth redistribution would cause massive instability and with the margin of today production the first two to introduce climate control will be eaten (economically speaking) by the third one.

on the other hand we could likely today engineer algae or fungi to fix carbon into cellulose but you're going to need massive space for their growth and some place for their disposal, unless you can make some sort of bioplastic out of it, because burning them would defeat the purpose, and I bet once you put the number in the unbelievable scale needed for the project would scare the bejesus out of the very same ambientalists types that are currently most vocal about saving the world but abhor nuclear

anyway I think the real issue NASA has about bioengineering are ethical, and Venus is in the same protection category as Venus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection

you can draw parallels between the development of cities as Rome, London, Chicago and Los Angeles substituting environmental protection with historical buildings protections. it's important to preserve the best and most relevant landmarks of course but too much and it becomes a real drag.

m0zg• 7 years ago

Technically we can. We just can't do it (currently) without ruining the living standards for 90% of the world's population.

BariumBlue• 7 years ago

Microbes require water, and there isn't enough for them on/in Venus

tfha4• 7 years ago

Earth microbes require water. Who knows what alien life has as its building blocks.

ianstallings3• 7 years ago

There is debate within the scientific community about changing other planets in general. Not everyone is convinced that we should alter or terraform to suit our needs.

Some related links:

https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/

https://www.astrobio.net/mars/should-we-terraform/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_terraforming

gubbrora• 7 years ago

This is like nimbyism on steroids. "No one build anything what if there is Rare Science in our backyards".

I mean yes I do kinda see your point, but priorities man. There are ridiculously large advantages to colonizing the universe and destroying a few samples is a low price.

jbay8084• 7 years ago

You might already know this, but Carl Sagan proposed exactly that plan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus

It would probably require more advanced bioengineering and understanding of ecology and extremophiles than we currently have, but it might still be the only feasible plan.

empath752• 7 years ago

So I had two thoughts while reading it:

Is it possible that in the 3 billion years that it had liquid water, Venus evolved advanced life that managed to trigger runaway greenhouse warming?

Secondly, is Venus’s atmosphere a worst case scenario for global warming here or is there something that would prevent it happening?

albemuth• 7 years ago

they would have just gone to Earth

gnulinux2• 7 years ago

How do you know? Can we go to Mars today? What if earth gets destroyed before we can emigrate to Mars? (assume that Mars is a clone of earth i.e. the same conditions we have in Earth)

Also it's possible earth wasn't suitable for Venisian life back then.

DennisP3• 7 years ago

Or just denied that it was a problem until it was too late to migrate to Earth before their civilization crashed.

WaxProlix• 7 years ago

Maybe they did :hmm:

gdubs• 7 years ago

I've often wondered the same thing!

A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult.

Not at all my area, but it doesn't seem like we can actually answer that question you posed. It's fascinating. Carl Sagan's COSMOS might be the first time I'd ever heard about Global Warming, and he explained how it was through the study of Venus that we really began to understand it.

stcredzero7• 7 years ago

Now imagine detecting one, when the entire planet is covered in a 90 bar atmosphere with sulphuric acid clouds.

I'll update my downer Sci-fi novel premise. Humanity makes its first Alcubierre drive warp ship. On its test run, something goes wrong, and the ship is shifted by a vast amount in time-space. The ship arrives at an unfamiliar, abandoned star system, with a different sized Sun, vast amounts of orbital construction, but an eerily similar though slightly different configuration of planets. Over time, the test pilot crew realizes that they were merely in stasis and "arrived" back in the Solar System far in the future, and that the 2nd Venus-like planet is actually the Earth.

Dylan16807• 7 years ago

A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult.

Depends on how you define advanced. Anything in geostationary orbit is basically there for the life of the solar system.

DennisP3• 7 years ago

According to James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren, Venus-level warming is far beyond anything we could achieve on Earth. Given our greater distance from the sun we don't have enough carbon to pull it off.

(The worst we could do is still enough to destroy us, though.)

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

Does that imply that an advanced enough Venusian life form could have triggered global warming there more easily?

mirimir3• 7 years ago

I see no reason why intelligent life with high technology could not have developed on Venus. Say, several hundred million years ago. And perhaps they triggered runaway greenhouse warming, which vaporized the oceans. And so perhaps it was the loss of the oceans that ended plate tectonics, not the other way around.

I doubt that runaway greenhouse warming could get so extreme for Earth. I recall reading that solar input is enough lower here. Also, at million-year scales, I gather that high CO2 levels increase weathering, and drive carbonate deposition in the oceans.

cr0sh• 7 years ago

I see no reason why intelligent life with high technology could not have developed on Venus. Say, several hundred million years ago. And perhaps they triggered runaway greenhouse warming, which vaporized the oceans. And so perhaps it was the loss of the oceans that ended plate tectonics, not the other way around.

The only way that thought experiment could make sense is if they had the technology to do that, but not the technology to escape Venus and get to Earth.

Think about it; several hundred million years ago, Earth was habitable; maybe not for modern humans (but I bet we could do it - though uncomfortably), but definitely life existed in some form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

So there was liquid water, and the Earth wasn't a Dante-esque hellscape of volcanos and lava, etc. It was probably much warmer and more humid, but overall not crazy to live on.

So if your situation was dire enough, and you had the technology to escape the planet (which you'd almost have to, if you had the energy resources to cause your own global warming and demise scenario) - wouldn't you at least try?

So either they tried and failed in some manner (never reaching Earth), or they succeeded (meaning?) or something in between.

Even if they didn't try, with the level of technology, wouldn't they at least have left something behind in the solar system that we'd recognised as created by intelligent life long ago? Some artifact somewhere?

Maybe they did, and we haven't found it (space is big - the solar system is a big place); but I'd almost expect there'd be something orbiting Venus that was artificial (though maybe again, we can't detect it from here - too small, likely inactive, etc). I guess a good question would be, if you were on Venus (or even in Venusian orbit) - could you detect Earth's satellites currently orbiting Earth? Could you detect a singular one (last of its kind) in a degraded, virtually inert state? Again, I don't know.

It's a bit fascinating to think about; part of me wants to say "we should be able/have found something by now" if such a scenario were real - but at the same time, I can think of reasons why we haven't or can't...

nickserv• 7 years ago

I wonder why there isn't a balloon mission being studied.

The upper atmosphere has temperature and pressure similar to Earth at sea level.

Maybe the wind is a big problem? Or insertion from orbit?

Frenchgeek• 7 years ago

Because then conspiracy theorists will understand a weather ballon can be an alien spacecraft too.

CodiePetersen2• 7 years ago

I think upper atmosphere study would be great. There are some colony designs that suggest an oxygen filled colony would float at earth pressure. And with the sulfuric acid and co2 you have everything you need to make water air and fuel. Not to mention protection from asteroids and deadly rays. It would be a challenge but all of the planets and other bodies present their own challenges.

sandworm101• 7 years ago

At the same ambient pressure, an O2 would float, but just barely. It wouldn't float like a hydrogen/helium balloon does on earth. If the pressure is the same on either side of the balloon, lift comes from different atomic weights of the gasses. Helium weights much less than air. But the O2 inside the Venus habitat doesn't weigh all that much less than the CO2 outside. As a practical matter, you would probably need lift balloons filled with something other than breathable air/O2. [1]

Then think about what you want to do in this habitat. A solar/nuke-powered refinery for producing rocket fuel? It would need lift bags the size of cities. Not the Goodyear blimp. Think bags filled with cubic kilometers of lifting gas.

[1] This is why balloons wouldn't work on Jupiter/Saturn etc. No balloon can float in a sea of hydrogen. We would need a 'balloon' filled with vacuum, or at least hydrogen under vacuum pressure in comparison to the hydrogen outside. Soft-sided bags wouldn't work.

dmos62• 7 years ago

"Soviet Union explored the Venus atmosphere with unmanned balloons in 1985 during the Vega mission". Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#The_Venus_mission

blotter_paper• 7 years ago

I know this isn't what you mean by "studied," but here's a NASA produced video mockup of manned blimps over Venus: https://youtu.be/0az7DEwG68A

aeorgnoieang2• 7 years ago

From the link:

This year, the Venera-D team released a report that covered a number of potential additions, including a balloon that could explore the cloudy atmosphere.

j0ba• 7 years ago

50 km from the surface, there are hurricane force winds, with temp and pressure similar to earth, but carbon dioxide atmosphere infused with sulfuric acid. Would be a bumpy ride. I wonder if there are tornadoes within that.

Isamu3• 7 years ago

Stay tuned for the Venus mechanical maker challenge:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/events/2019/3/1/mechanical-make...

With its sulfuric acid clouds, temperatures over 450°C, and 92 times the surface pressure of Earth, Venus is one of the most hostile planetary environments in the solar system. Prior missions have only survived hours! But an automaton (or clockwork mechanical robot) could solve this problem. By utilizing high-temperature alloys, the clockwork rover would survive for months, allowing it to collect and return valuable long-term science data from the surface of Venus.
Challenge to be announced on July 8, 2019

Question: does NASA have a Venus environmental chamber? They must, right? How big is it?

_Microft• 7 years ago

This is great, I didn't know they were following up on this concept. I had read an article [0] from 2017 before but wasn't aware of any further developments.

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/space-robots/jp...

Robotbeat2• 7 years ago

Yes. NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio has one, I believe. They were building it when I was an intern ~6 years ago.

Of course, Glenn also has high temperature electronics. Memory is hard to come by, but simple analog and digital circuits are feasible (enough for data digitization, multiplexing, some forward error correction, and transmission to orbital assets).

Here are a couple papers on the idea of all-high-temperature-electronics designs (which I think are a lot more realistic and effective than a mechanical automaton, as fun as that sounds) for a long duration lander design (can be adapted to a rover, etc, as well) related to the work I did:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201400...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457651...

scottlocklin• 7 years ago

Cool stuff. One of my roomies in collitch got his Ph.D. with Choyke who I think is still the godfather of high-bandgap semiconductor physics.

Looks like NASA wants to make cpus with Gallium Nitride now:

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-gallium-nitride-processornext-...

layoutIfNeeded• 7 years ago

It’s called an autoclave...

Isamu3• 7 years ago

Ha! If it's roomy, plus 92 atmospheres (plus hot acid clouds!)

aeorgnoieang2• 7 years ago

From the link:

... at the Glenn Research Center. The team has already tested the circuits in a Venus simulation chamber — a 14-tonne stainless-steel tank that can imitate the temperature, pressure and specific chemistry of the Venusian surface.

Isamu3• 7 years ago

Thanks, I missed that! Sounds pretty cool.

gene-h• 7 years ago

I don't think anyone won the last challenge, which was for making a mechanical camera, because they kept extending the deadline. The requirements for the camera they wanted were pretty stringent. If they were willing to accept different resolutions image shapes then a hacked antique IR camera would win. Old IR cameras mechanically raster scanned a single detector over a scene fast enough for 15 fps video.

SaberTail• 7 years ago

I'm glad Venus is getting more attention. Mars seems to get the most attention as a place to visit, but we seem to ignore Venus.

Venus has a few things going for it that I think make it a better choice for permanent human habitation than Mars.

* Venus has nearly Earth-like gravity (8.9 m/s² instead of 9.8 m/s²)

* The atmosphere 50 km above the surface is the right temperature for liquid water, and has a similar atmospheric pressure to Earth at sea level. [1]

* Venus has suffered a runaway greenhouse effect. It's a good place to experiment on how to mitigate or reverse that without risking Earth. And what we do learn may be applicable to Earth in the not-too-distant future.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/200300...

modzu3• 7 years ago

well you said it: we know exactly how to heat up mars (greenhouse gases) but its not so clear how to cool down venus. also mars has water.

hathawsh3• 7 years ago

We don't need to cool it down. We could float a platform about 49.5 km above the surface of Venus, where the temperature and pressure nearly match the earth at sea level. To launch a probe, we could simply drop it from the platform.

This article about Venus is very enlightening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus

sfkdjf9j3j• 7 years ago

I wouldn't say we know exactly how to heat up Mars. Without a magnetic field, any atmosphere we conjure out of the polar regions would escape into space. We are far, far closer to completely reversing the effects of climate change on Earth than we are to teraforming Mars.

jcranmer• 7 years ago

Mars' atmosphere is 95.3% carbon dioxide, which means that the problem we have to solve is not "how do we inject craptons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere" but "how do we stop the solar wind from stripping away the atmosphere," which is not a problem we have a clear idea as to how to solve.

garmaine5• 7 years ago

We do know how to cool Venus. Build a sun shade. It’s an old idea, and a simple idea, and there’s lots of engineering literature on how it can be reasonably accomplished.

jbay8084• 7 years ago

Carl Sagan once proposed an interesting concept of terraforming Venus by floating some kind of bacteria in its atmosphere. The bacteria would be constantly drifting down to the surface and dying, but with no predators and ample resources, multiplying quickly enough to replace the losses, and small enough to be kept aloft by air currents. Gradually they would transform the carbon back into solid mass, and bring the atmospheric pressures and temperatures down to earth levels.

Later on in his career he decided against that scheme, but with our progress in biotechnology, it might be the only feasible approach.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus

mandevil• 7 years ago

The Soviet Union always put more attention on Venus, and the US more on Mars. From what I can tell this dates back to before there were actual space programs, so I strongly suspect this has to do with the science fiction in the respective languages.

For example in H.G. Wells 1898 War of the Worlds, the bad guys are from Mars, Edgar Rice Burroghs John Carter series is about Mars, etc. whereas engineer cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktsitov wrote that when he was 10 (~1936) he came to a sad realization. Since going into space was better than everything else, any effort he put into anything other than going into space was wasted effort, BUT by the time he got the Ph.D he would need to contribute to that program men would already be on Venus, so he would never be the first to anything[1]. I don't know Russian language sci-fi well enough to guess what the source for this (or maybe was it Tsiolkovsky? dunno), but that suggests to me that the Soviet interest in Venus wasn't just because the US had a stranglehold on Mars or anything like that, it was because Venus spoke to them in the same way that Mars did to Americans. Any Russian speakers can confirm?

[1]: He ended up as Sergei Korolev's right hand man, and was tasked by the Chief Designer himself with stripping all the safety devices out of the Vostok capsule so that it could hold three men [Vokshod]. When Feoktistov objected, Korolev told him if he did a good job, he'd get to take it into space, and Feoktistov accepted the challenge.

autokad• 7 years ago

i think the primary reason for US interest in mars is due to the fact that it is much more likely that mars #1) previously contained life and #2) we will be able to find evidence of #1 on mars, vs venus.

m4rtink2• 7 years ago

One reason could be that early soviet space probes had big issues with durability, generally caused by their unreliable pressurized & gas cooled (generally pure nitrogen at atmospheric pressure) electronics - US generally used much more reliable vacuum rated electronics).

For this the signifficantly shorter flight time to Venus is a big advantage, not to mention that a lander wont survive for long anyway, further reducing issues with probe longevity.

Brakenshire• 7 years ago

Russia got the first probe on Venus, so maybe it’s success being celebrated and reinforcing more interest.

I just saw an episode of the new BBC series Planets talking about this. One thing they mentioned was that it was seriously suggested even in the 40’s that there could be rainforests and a fertile surface underneath the cloud cover on Venus. Could see the mystery in particular being an interesting thing to grow up hearing about.

cpv• 7 years ago

Here is a book from the soviet era, about Venus

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23302599

"Тайна утренней зари"/"The Mystery of the Dawn"/"Taina Luceafărului".

As for their space program, I do believe they had almost similar investment for Venus and Mars, just Venus was more approachable and the missions were more fruitful(?). They canceled some Mars and Venus programs in time. Some wikipedia page about USSR space program:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program

29athrowaway• 7 years ago

Venus is closer to Earth.

killjoywashere2• 7 years ago

Given a choice of death by fire and death by cold, death by cold is easier to mitigate against, and is the default problem in space. To survive Venus, you have to first survive the freezing trip to Venus. So you need heating and air conditioning. A lot. Of both.

On Mars, you only need the heating systems that got you to Mars.

Similar problem for radiation: going to Mars leads to less radiation. Going to Venus increases radiation. So in Venus orbit, you need more shielding than you need at low Earth orbit. On Mars, you need less.

There's another commentor suggesting floating in steel balloons. Um, weather is going to be rough. Really, really rough. The mass of building materials necessary to survive the storms strikes me as likely deal-breaker. Never mind the complete lack of light.

I don't know if everything is harder on Venus, but most of the first-order issues are substantially harder.

User234• 7 years ago

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Venus’s high temperatures might be determined by solar radiation and the inverse square law and that its atmosphere is on the consequence side of the expression.

That said I entirely agree we should be exploring it!

jbay8084• 7 years ago

That's a pretty tenuous limb to go out on.

If that were the case, why is Venus hotter than Mercury, despite being farther away from the sun and having an albedo of 0.75? (Mercury's is about 0.1).

In fact, with its high albedo Venus reflects so much sunlight that it absorbs even less solar energy than Earth does, but despite that, it's hotter than mercury. I am pretty sure that's all due to its atmosphere, and I think every planetary scientist would agree.

eloff• 7 years ago

Why couldn't you vacuum insulate the electronics and place some kind of radiative cooling on top of them? You'd need the cooler to be able to radiate all the radiative energy coming into the chamber from outside it, plus what the electronics generate. You'd want the thermos type chamber to be reflective to radiation from one side only.

It would depend on how low energy you can get the electronics, plus how efficient your black body cooler is. I have no idea if the latter could be done practically.

Might be a lot easier than high temperature electronics or mechanical alternatives.

emiliobumachar2• 7 years ago

Pretty sure a completely passive cooling system able to maintain its inside cooler than its outside would violate thermodynamics somehow. I'm not a physicist though.

dflock• 7 years ago

Why couldn't you vacuum insulate the electronics and place some kind of radiative cooling on top of them?

Radiative cooling only works if you have a hot source and a relatively cooler sink - on Earth, usually the atmosphere.

On Venus the atmosphere is ~462 °C at the surface, so it's going to be much hotter than your electronics - so your sink will be hotter than your source, so the "raditaive cooling" will run in reverse.

Also, the atmospheric pressure on Venus is very high - 92 atmospheres at the surface - the equivalent of being 1km underwater on Earth. Maintaining a vacuum chamber with this much outside pressure (not to mention temperature) would be an incredible feat of materials engineering - and would probably by extremely heavy.

You would also still need sensors and communications outside your vacuum chamber, otherwise your expensive probe can't actually do anything useful.

curtis• 7 years ago

Because of Venus's think atmosphere, landing a probe or rover is really easy. The downside, also because of Venus's thick atmosphere, is that the surface is really, really hot. That limits the lifetime of hardware on the surface.

I think it ought to be possible to design a probe that's more like a submersible than a rover. Technically it would be an airship rather than a submarine, but given Venus's thick atmosphere it could be quite heavy and robust. This vehicle could bounce between the surface (for science) and the upper atmosphere (for recharging). In the upper atmosphere the probe could make more coolant from the atmosphere using solar power, and then it could make another dive to the surface.

ahje• 7 years ago

An airship seems like the most survivable option for longer missions.

I wonder if it would be possible to use one as a carrier for smaller drone-ships. Wind speeds on Venus are quite low, but the force is probably quite insane considering the atmospheric pressure.

m4rtink2• 7 years ago

For the record the soviet Vega probes deployed a couple baloons and they worked just fine for quite a while.

taf2• 7 years ago

I think this from 2014 looks really cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcHkWKp9e4Y

api• 7 years ago

I really wonder if we'd be likely to find fossils underground there. Of course landing long enough without melting to find them would be hard.

wainstead• 7 years ago

The Soviets succeeded in returning surface images from a number of their landers, and the photos are quite tantalizing.

http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

"Venus Revealed" is a pretty good read:

https://www.amazon.com/Venus-Revealed-Clouds-Mysteriious-Pla...

ndiscussion• 7 years ago

very cool, thanks for sharing

gnl• 7 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but no argument for colonising Venus could possibly be complete without digging this gem of a comment out of the archives about cooking a turkey there: http://www.transterrestrial.com/2013/12/09/venerian-gas-phas...

dekhn• 7 years ago

Reading about the Soviet Union's systematic process to finally get some decent data from a lander was very impressive.

fouc• 7 years ago

Has anyone considered colonizing asteroids? If you can spin the asteroids you can generate enough centripetal force to mimic gravity.

Not sure what the chances of asteroids being solid enough to be spun without flying apart though. Another option would be to build a track around the asteroid and move a colony along that track.

Need about 1 kilometer of radius from center and 1 rotation per minute to generate 1 g force.

Interesting.. gravity train: https://i.imgur.com/Q2D5i1K.png

artur_makly• 7 years ago

“But momentum is building to explore Venus, in part because scientists say it could hold the secret to understanding what makes a planet habitable. Once Earth’s twin, today Venus is a hellish abode where surface temperatures reach more than 400 °C, atmospheric pressures slam down with enough force to crush heavy machinery and clouds of sulfuric acid blow through the sky. If researchers could decipher why conditions on Venus turned so deadly, that would help them to assess whether life might exist on some of the thousand-plus rocky worlds that astronomers are discovering throughout the Galaxy.”.

life exists here. let’s stop looking for exit strategies and stop wasting valuable time and money on far away rocks.

we need to put all that time and energy dreaming and solving for a better EARTH.

steve_taylor• 7 years ago

There’s no reason 7.7 billion people can’t collectively do more than one thing at the same time.

ValleyOfTheMtns• 7 years ago

Yachts on the methane oceans of Titan and dirigibles in the skies of Venus.

I hope I live to see all this.

Momentum is building to explore Venus

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