41–50 of 102 posts
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.
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.
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.
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) b…
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 t…
Critically, it gains us raw materials. Space is empty. The upper atmosphere of Venus is full of elements we can use to sustain life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://twitter.com/StepsLeaps
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 sa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> I'm not sure what that gains us over just having a habitat in orbit though. 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.
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. :)
Technology developed fast. Sputnik was in 1957. 20 years later we had: 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 the 1970s, we had calculator watches. Now we have smartphones. So that's one way to look at it :)
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) b…
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.
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) b…
> 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, yo…
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) b…
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.