Soviet Venus Images (2004) • Hacker News Board

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#91

Post by belter » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

wnscooke wrote: post #84

belter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Thanks _Microft :-) As you you might have guessed English is not my native 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.

The Grammaire Française recommends:

"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.

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#92

Post by pengaru » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #20

mattowen_uk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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 re…

Planets are protective, you're going to have a tough time dealing with radiation poisoning spending a lifetime in space without them.

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#93

Post by candiodari » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

_Microft wrote: post #83

eloff wrote: post #33

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…

> 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.

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#94

Post by sandworm101 » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #93

_Microft wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 complai…

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.

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#95

Post by areoform » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #89

areoform wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 brin…

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.…

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/_areoform/status/1373376028861734918

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#96

Post by webnrrd2k » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

at_compile_time wrote: post #66

generalizations wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#97

Post by justshowpost » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:17 AM UTC

> 2004

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...

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#98

Post by Gravityloss » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #85

cletus wrote: post #15

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 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.

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#99

Post by animal531 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

_Microft wrote: post #62

canadianfella wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you put spaces before punctuation?

This is off-topic but I think I can help. 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... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#French

Interesting thanks, I've never seen that before.

Re: Soviet Venus Images (2004)

#100

Post by dylan604 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 11:16 AM UTC

Gravityloss wrote: post #98

dylan604 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.