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NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

science.nasa.gov

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Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#31

Post by dataflow »

cyberax wrote: post #23
WalterBright wrote: post #2

I wonder if Venus could be terraformed via a sun shield placed in orbit around it. How big would it have to be to reverse the runaway greenhouse effect?

I've read a crazy proposal: 1. "Humidify" the atmosphere by crashing comets into Venus. This will also allow us to create a temporary "cloud" around Venus that can shield it from the Sun and lower down the temperature. 2. Once the temperature is low enough, Venus will get oceans on its surface. 3. At this point, CO2 can be split into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen will be immediately bound by the huge amount of under-oxid…

How many comets would you have to crash and how would one redirect and crash them that wouldn't make this exotic-level?

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#32

Post by nradov »

trelane wrote: post #26
perihelions wrote: post #6

- "Several upcoming missions, including NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging)" DAVINCI is actually cancelled in the latest budget request. For obvious reasons, the NASA press office (the OP) won't talk about this. But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone. https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-...

The full proposed budget is available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal... folks are interested in seeing the whole picture and reasoning.

HTTP 404

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#33

Post by Loughla »

cyberax wrote: post #23
WalterBright wrote: post #2

I wonder if Venus could be terraformed via a sun shield placed in orbit around it. How big would it have to be to reverse the runaway greenhouse effect?

I've read a crazy proposal: 1. "Humidify" the atmosphere by crashing comets into Venus. This will also allow us to create a temporary "cloud" around Venus that can shield it from the Sun and lower down the temperature. 2. Once the temperature is low enough, Venus will get oceans on its surface. 3. At this point, CO2 can be split into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen will be immediately bound by the huge amount of under-oxid…

We'll be dead by then I'm afraid.

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#34

Post by erkt »

trelane wrote: post #26
perihelions wrote: post #6

- "Several upcoming missions, including NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging)" DAVINCI is actually cancelled in the latest budget request. For obvious reasons, the NASA press office (the OP) won't talk about this. But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone. https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-...

The full proposed budget is available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal... folks are interested in seeing the whole picture and reasoning.

Typo in your URL. replace the last l with a d ....".pdf" not ".plf"

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#35

Post by gcanyon »

bdamm wrote: post #13
shepardrtc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like a solar powered space elevator that just blows atmosphere into the sun

That would require a lot of energy to ensure the gasses escape Venus' gravitational pull, which would in turn effectively be a rocket. So then we'd be adjusting to ensure we don't mess with Venus' orbit too much.

Venus outweighs its atmosphere by about 10,000 times. This is actually less than I thought -- for comparison Earth outweighs its atmosphere by over 1,000,000 times, which is still far less than I would have guessed.

Venus's escape velocity is less than 1/3rd of its orbital velocity. According to google, Venus's orbit, despite being very circular, causes its velocity to vary by a KM/s from aphelion to perihelion.

So I believe you could send all of Venus's atmosphere off permanently into space at the cost of about 1/30,000th of Venus's orbital velocity, meaning you could very slightly circularize its orbit further.

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#36

Post by gcanyon »

netsharc wrote: post #16
quotemstr wrote: post #10

Venus is a damned shame. Had planetary evolution gone just slightly differently, the solar system could have had two habitable water planets. Mars, owing to its size, was never going to cut it, but Venus might have.

I wonder how a system with 2 planets with intelligent lifeforms would've developed culturally and politically... if both civilizations grew at the same rate, 2 Galileos would've looked at the other planet and figured out "we have neighbors!", but it'd be several hundred more years before communication could be done. Even know we don't have manned missions to Mars or Venus...

H.G. Wells has you covered here.

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#37

Post by jmclnx »

perihelions wrote: post #6

- "Several upcoming missions, including NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging)" DAVINCI is actually cancelled in the latest budget request. For obvious reasons, the NASA press office (the OP) won't talk about this. But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone. https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-...

That really stinks. As I said before, the US is handing all good research and science ti China.

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#38

Post by gcanyon »

fallingknife wrote: post #28
netsharc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how a system with 2 planets with intelligent lifeforms would've developed culturally and politically... if both civilizations grew at the same rate, 2 Galileos would've looked at the other planet and figured out "we have neighbors!", but it'd be several hundred more years before communication could be done. Even know we don't have manned missions to Mars or Venus...

Luckily we are up gravity well from them and also have a moon as a great source of low launch cost projectiles.

Using Hohmann transfer, I believe the energy cost is the same both ways. Of course as you point out we have the Moon, "they" have none. So we'd have plenty of rocks to throw.

That said, we'd have to throw much bigger rocks to penetrate their atmosphere. And the likely (to me) actual plans would be:

Us: launch to the Moon, set up there, launch rocks from the Moon to Venus.

Venusians: launch and travel to the asteroid belt, launch an asteroid toward Earth.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that our plan would be the same as theirs: we'd both be heading for the asteroid belt, because nothing we could reasonably launch from the Moon would put a dent in Venus with that atmosphere.

And if we assume they actually can launch through that atmosphere, we're screwed: if they can do that, they're way ahead of us.

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#39

Post by bryan0 »

p1mrx wrote: post #22

> Scientists expected the outermost layer of Venus’ crust would grow thicker and thicker over time I recall watching this NOVA episode in 1995 where scientists had no idea whether the lithosphere is thick or thin. Seek to 36 minutes: https://archive.org/details/VenusUnveiled/NOVA.S22E10.Venus....

I remember that episode being excellent! Scientists could tell that Venus’s crust was somehow reforming because of the crater pattern but the didn’t know whether it was gradual change or something catastrophic, and the thickness of the crust would point to one way or the other but they didn’t have that data.

> The paper used modeling to determine that its crust is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) thick on average and at most 40 miles (65 kilometers) thick.

So would that be considered “thick” or “thin”?

Re: NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

#40

Post by trelane »

erkt wrote: post #34
trelane wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full proposed budget is available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal... folks are interested in seeing the whole picture and reasoning.

Typo in your URL. replace the last l with a d ....".pdf" not ".plf"

Thanks! Fixed.

And no thanks to autocorrect.

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