Soviet Venus Images (2004)
mentallandscape.com
mentallandscape.com
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.
(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.)
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.
"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.
[0] https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
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"
https://www.wired.com/2013/04/vega-venus-rain/
"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."
"Every Picture From Venus' Surface, Ever"
https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-...
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Stylistic_varian...
"Toujours un espace avant et après: le point-virgule, le point d'interrogation, le point d'exclamation et les deux points."
https://grammaire.reverso.net/les-espaces-et-la-ponctuation/
But for French Canadian variations the indication is just a "smaller" space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus#Cooling_...
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.
Critically, it gains us raw materials. Space is empty. The upper atmosphere of Venus is full of elements we can use to sustain life.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa...
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.
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.
NASA heard your July 4th plea, and sees you Discovery Mission 15 (VERITAS) and 16 (DAVINCI+). Targeted to launch in 2028 and 2029/30 respectively.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Program
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.
Hardy is an understatement. Life would need an entirely different chemistry to function at 730K.
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.
Oxygen combined with other atoms is not rare. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_Mars
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the whole, not sure how deeply you follow the politics of this, it all depends on what the focus of the next decadal is, https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/planetary-science...
I'm hoping that Neptune is on the list.
> a return to Neptune
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.
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.
The United States landed probes on Mars in 1976.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program
The Voyager program:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1
The Space Shuttle was developed in the 1970’s
Supersonic commercial flight… bullet trains in Japan and France…
As a kid in the 1970’s, I imagined 2021 would be much more futuristic.
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.
> a library with every book
LOL. Reality wants a word with it's licenses and DMCA-s.
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.
-- Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth, 1976
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267
That itself was nearly a decade after the newspad of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968):
http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=529
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=-3949GAIokg
See also "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush, 1945. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... (Numerous HN discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You'll find similar notions proposed by H.G. Wells (1930s), Paul Otlet (1930s), and arguably Denis Diderot (18th century).
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.
In the 1970s, we had calculator watches. Now we have smartphones. So that's one way to look at it :)
Sure, some things have greatly improved in the last 50 years.
Color television was a big thing in the late 60’s. Now we’ve gone from analog to digital at 4K on huge flat panels.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220720382_Image_inp...
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasime...
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/magellan/in-depth/
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.
Hacker Olds
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).
http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-gree...
Photos of the Surface of Venus (1975) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188247 - Feb 2021 (2 comments)
Soviet Venus Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016529 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)
Soviet Venus Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360763 - Aug 2012 (51 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26206335
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1410710988...
For Venus you only have to keep the probe working for a month or tu max, for Mars it needs two survive for almost a year at the minimum.
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 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.