Category: Venus

[/caption]“While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus.”

This might sound like a quote taken from the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist or the chant from someone who spent an hour too many at an Amsterdam coffee shop, but it wasn’t.

Actually, these are the words of the wife of the Japanese premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama.

Mrs Miyuki Hatoyama might be married to a man Japan nicknames “The Alien,” but it looks like it’s not him who has dreams of an extraterrestrial nature…

If there’s one thing politicians must dread when they are voted into a position of power, it’s the past. Previous indiscretions, past conversations, old business that involved major campaign donors; all of these must keep many government ministers awake at night, worried that the media will dig up some dirt.

However, in the case of the soon-to-be prime minister of Japan (who won the recent elections with a landslide victory), it’s his 66-year old wife who wrote something last year in a book called Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered, that’s causing a stir. But through his wife’s own admission, Yukio Hatoyama is an open minded fellow and probably won’t be concerned about what the public may think of Miyuki’s book.

Very Strange Things documents Mrs Hatoyama’s experiences 20 years ago when a UFO picked her up and took her to Venus. “It was a very beautiful place and it was really green,” she observed.

If by “green” she actually means “dark brown,” and by “beautiful” she means “a tropical, bone crushing atmosphere, stuffed with poisonous gas and a landscape resembling hell,” then I think Miyuki really did fly there.

Naturally, after she had her joyride to Venus, Miyuki arrived back in bed, next to her now ex-husband who told her it was just a dream.

In addition to her night-time jaunts around the Solar System, Miyuki also partakes in a little solar feast every now and again. On a Japanese TV show earlier this year, Miyuki went into some detail about her spiritualistic beliefs.

“I also eat the sun,” she said on the program, closing her eyes, pulling pieces off an imaginary Sun. “Like this, hum, hum, hum. It gives me enormous energy […] My husband has recently started doing that too.”

This all seems like a lot of fun, but what does this mean for Japan? As noted by Keith Cowing over at NASA Watch, perhaps we’ll see a boost in JAXA (the Japanese space agency) funding. It might also go some way to explaining why there’s been a surge of interest in Japanese space solar power!

Things might go a little too far if we start seeing JAXA UFO patrols in low-Earth orbit, but for now, I suspect it’s going to be a rather flamboyant term in office for the Hatoyama’s…

Sources: Reuters, NASA Watch, Time

[/caption]
Venus is glowing in infrared! At least at night, anyway. The Venus Express spacecraft has observed an eerie glow in the night-time atmosphere of Venus. This infrared glow comes from nitric oxide and is showing scientists that the atmosphere of Earth’s nearest neighbor is a temperamental place of high winds and turbulence. Since this glow is infrared, we can’t see it with our eyes but lucky for us, the ESA’s spacecraft is equipped with the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) instrument, which can see these wavelengths. A glow like this has never been detected in the atmospheres of Earth or Mars, even though nitric oxide molecules are present. So just why is Venus glowing, and what is this glow telling us?

“The nightglow can give us a lot of information,” says Antonio García Muñoz, who was at the Australian National University when the research was carried out; he is now located at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain. “It can provide details about the temperature, wind direction, composition and chemistry of an atmosphere.”

VIRTIS has made two clear-cut detections of the so-called nightglow for nitric oxide at Venus. This is the first time such infrared detections have been made for any planet and provide a new insight into Venus’s atmosphere

The nightglow is ultimately caused by the Sun’s ultraviolet light, which streams into a planet’s atmosphere and breaks the molecules up into atoms and other simpler molecules. The free atoms may recombine again and, in specific cases, the resulting molecule is endowed with some extra energy that is subsequently lost in the form of light. On the day-side of the planet, any atoms that do find their way back together are outshone by the sunlight falling into the atmosphere.

But on the night-side, where atoms are transported by a vigorous diurnal circulation, the glow can be seen with appropriate instruments, such as VIRTIS.

It also highlights a new mystery. “These results show that there could be at least twice as much hydrogen in the upper atmosphere of Venus than we thought,” says Delva. The detected hydrogen ions could exist in atmospheric regions high above the surface of the planet; but the source of these regions is unknown.

The nightglow on Venus has been seen at infrared wavelengths before, betraying oxygen molecules and the hydroxyl radical, but this is the first detection of nitric oxide at those wavelengths. It offers data about the atmosphere of Venus that lies above the cloud tops at around 70 km. The oxygen and hydroxyl emissions come from 90-100 km, whereas the nitric oxide comes from 110-120 km altitude.

Yet, even VIRTIS cannot see the nitric oxide nightglow all the time because it is often just too faint. “Luckily for us, Venus has a temperamental atmosphere,” says García Muñoz, “Packets of oxygen and nitrogen atoms are blown around.” Sometimes these become dense enough to boost the brightness of the nightglow, making it visible to VIRTIS.

Venus Express can observe the three nightglow emissions simultaneously, and this gives rise to a mystery. The nightglows from the different molecules do not necessarily happen together. “Perhaps when we have more observations, we will understand the correlation between them,” says García Muñoz.

In order to do that, the VIRTIS team plans to continue monitoring the planet, building up a database of this fascinating phenomenon.

Source: ESA

[/caption]
A new look at data gathered from the Galileo spacecraft in 1990 reveals that Venus at one time may have been habitable, with evidence of past continents and oceans. In a flyby of Venus on the spacecraft’s journey to Jupiter, a near-infrared mapping instrument detected signatures which the researchers have interpreted as granite. An international team led by planetary scientist George Hashimoto, at Okayama University, Japan, found that Venus’s highland regions emitted less infrared radiation than its lowlands. One interpretation of this dichotomy, says the team’s new paper, is that the highlands are composed largely of ‘felsic’ rocks, particularly granite. Granite, which on Earth is found in continental crust, requires water for its formation.

The Galileo spacecraft was the first use of infrared to look at Venus. Scientists had believed that only radar could see through the dense clouds of sulfuric acid in Venus’s atmosphere to the surface. “Detecting the surface in the infrared is a breakthrough,” co-author Kevin Baines from JPL was quoted in an article in Nature.

The article also quoted another JPL scientist, David Crisp, who was not involved in this study as saying these new conclusions aren’t supported either by the available data or the team’s own models.

“We understand our paper doesn’t resolve everything,” responds co-author Seiji Sugita, a planetary scientist at the University of Tokyo. Sugita says the next step is to apply their models to data from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft, which is already orbiting Venus, and the Japanese Space Agency’s Venus Climate Orbiter, scheduled for launch in 2010.

The possible presence of granite suggests that tectonic plate movement and continent formation may have occurred on Venus, as well as recycling of water and carbon between the planet’s mantle and atmosphere.
Venus is now hellishly hot and dry, with an atmosphere of 96% carbon dioxide and a surface temperature of around 460 degrees C, but some scientists think our neighboring planet may have once have been more like Earth.

Another scientist quoted in the Nature article, geophysicist Norm Sleep of Stanford University in California said Venus might have once been almost entirely underwater. “Although without further geochemical data, he adds, we don’t know whether this early ocean’s temperature was 30 degrees C or 150 degrees C,” he said.

But any ocean on Venus would have lasted only a few hundred million years. As the Sun became hotter and brighter, the planet experienced a runaway greenhouse effect. “Any life on Venus that hadn’t figured out how to colonize the cloud tops a billion years after the planet’s formation would have been in big trouble,” says Sleep.

Sources: Nature, Abstract