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Venus Rising
The Solar System >
So you want to know what that bright light is hovering mysteriously in the eastern predawn skies, the light you could swear wasn’t there just months ago.
I thought you’d never ask!
For early risers, those who must send kids off to school or get early onto those maniacal freeways of ours, there has been a shimmering orb that rises before the sun and has been entertaining us since the beginning of January.
Why, it appears to be a star! A wandering star, to wax poetic about it, the way it changes position through the weeks. And it was once believed to be just that – a star that roamed, not one fixed onto the heavens above like all those other pricks of light that trustily return to their same positions night after night, month after month, year after year.
The Greeks gave this heavenly body and a half dozen more the name “wanderer” - in Greek “planetes” - which we formed into “planet.”
Of course, the big bright one now gracing our skies, the brightest of them all, is Venus, our nearest but not so dearest neighbor.
At the moment she is a mere 49 million miles away from us, a stone’s throw in cosmological terms. And right now, unknown to many, there is a spacecraft headed her way.
The European Space Agency is sending the Venus Express there to study that bizarre, twisted sister of ours. Scheduled to enter Venusian orbit just a month from now, it will study the hellish surface of the planet and its bizarre climate.
What is so outlandish about that pretty addition to our morning commute? Hmmm… let’s see. Try everything.
Yes, she is the same size and mass and density as our planet, but that’s it as far as being our twin. This dysfunctional sibling of ours has all the earmarks of being designed for the devil himself.
The surface temperature is about 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Check your stove now and see that it can’t get above about 500 Fahrenheit at full blast. It’s just a little toasty on the Bright One.
And if you could land on its surface you’d be subject to pressures that are nearly 90 times that of our own atmospheric pressure. That’s like being a kilometer under water. I don’t know about you but I get all whiney with the crushing pressure that comes in diving into the deep end of a backyard pool, let alone more than a half mile down into an ocean. And we’re talking only of Venus’ atmosphere, its “air”!
The Soviet spacecraft sent there in the 1980’s could survive only an hour on the surface before Venus claimed it as its latest victim.
The choking, cloud covered atmosphere of Venus is so unbelievably thick that only the biggest rocks can plummet from space through to the surface. That’s why we see no craters there smaller than about two kilometers. Those poor wannabe impactors were burned up in the beefy atmosphere, or broke apart into a million pieces before reaching the face of Venus.
And even if you manage to make it through the thick sulfuric acid clouds, through the sea of baking carbon dioxide gas, and hit the surface – even if you manage to make an impact and leave your mark on that bleeding hot facade, odds are your grave won’t be marked for long.
It appears that the surface of Venus, unable to release its internal pressures from below slowly and regularly like our planet does, lets it all off at once. This amounts to what astronomers believe is a massive global volcanic phenomenon that completely resurfaces the face of the planet, obliterating all signs of previous impacts. Yeah, there’s a fun place.
Ideally the Venus Express will help us understand that beautiful diamond in the sky a lot better. What happened to all her water? What happened there early on to give Venus such a vastly different outcome? When and why did things so horribly bad?
Whatever we learn by delving deeper into Venus one thing is for sure, it will make me appreciate our beautiful Blue Wonder even more.
Posted by Mark Ritter at 2006.03. 5 09:48 AM | Comments (0)
