On June 5th, 2012, the NASA/JAXA Hinode mission captured these stunning views of the transit of Venus. Credit: JAXA/NASA/Lockheed Martin
Earth and Venus are often called “sister planets” because they share some key characteristics. Like Earth, Venus is a terrestrial planet (i.e. composed of silicate minerals and metals) and orbits within our Sun’s habitable zone. But of course, they are also some major differences between them, like the fact that Venus’ is atmosphere is extremely dense and the hottest in the Solar System.
This is particularly interesting when you consider that Venus is not the closest planet to our Sun (that would be Mercury). In fact, its distance from the Sun is just over 70% the distance between Earth and the Sun. And due to its low eccentricity, there is very little variation in its distance during the course of its orbital period.
Perihelion and Aphelion:
While all planets follow an elliptical orbit, Venus’s orbit is the least eccentric of any of the Solar Planets. In fact, with an eccentricity of just 0.006772 , its orbit is the closest to being circular of any of the planets. It’s average distance (semi-major axis) from the Sun is 108,208,000 km (67,237,334 mi), and ranges from 107,477,000 km (66,783,112 mi) at perihelion to 108,939,000 km (67,691,556 mi) at aphelion.
Earth and Venus’ orbit compared. Credit: Sky and Telescope
To put it another way, Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of 0.723 AU, which ranges from 0.718 AU at its closest to 0.728 AU at its farthest. Compare this to Earth’s eccentricity of 0.0167, which means that it orbits the Sun at an average distance of 1 AU, and that this distance ranges between 0.983 and 1.0167 AUs during its orbital period.
To express that in precise terms, the Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 149,598,023 km (92,955,902 mi), and varies between a distance of 147,095,000 km (91,401,000 mi) at perihelion to a distance of 152,100,000 km (94,500,000 mi) at aphelion.
Mars, by contrast, orbits the Sun at an average distance of 227,939,200 km (141,634,852 mi), or 1.52 AU. But due to its high eccentricity of 0.0934, it ranges from a distance of 206,700,000 km (128,437,425 mi) at perihelion to 249,200,000 km (154,845,700 mi) at aphelion – or between 1.38 to 1.666 AUs.
Mercury, meanwhile, has the highest eccentricity of any planet in the Solar System – a surprising 0.2056. While it’s average distance from the Sun is 57,909,050 km (35,983,015 mi), or 0.387 AU, it ranges from 46,001,200 km (28,583,820 mi) at perihelion to 69,816,900 km (43,382,210 mi) at aphelion – or 0.3075 to 0.4667 AUs.
Animated diagram showing the spacing of the Solar Systems planet’s, the unusually closely spaced orbits of six of the most distant KBOs, and the possible “Planet 9”. Credit: Caltech/nagualdesign
Hence, you might say Venus is something of an oddity compared to its fellow-terrestrial planets. Whereas they all orbit our Sun with a certain degree of eccentricity (from fair to extreme), Venus is the closest to orbiting in a circular pattern. And with an orbital velocity of 35.02 km/s (126,072 km/h; 78,337.5 mph), Venus takes 224.7 Earth days to complete a single orbit around the Sun.
Retrograde Motion:
Another oddity of Venus is the peculiar nature of its rotation. Whereas most objects in our Solar System have a rotation that is in the same direction as their orbit around the Sun, Venus’ rotation is retrograde to its orbit. In other words, if you could view the Solar System from above the Sun’s northern polar region, all of the planets would appear to be orbiting it in a counter-clockwise direction.
They would also appear to be rotating on their axis in the same counter-clockwise direction. But Venus would appear to be slowly rotating in a clockwise direction, taking about 243 days to complete a single rotation. This is not only the slowest rotation period of any planet, it also means that a sidereal day on Venus lasts longer than a Venusian year.
A popular theory states that this is due to two major impacts taking place between Venus and a series protoplanets in the distant past. Much like the impact that is believed to have created the Moon (between Earth and Theia), the first of these impact would have created a moon in orbit of Venus, while a second (10 million years later) would reverseed its rotation and caused the moon to de-orbit.
Artist’s concept of a collision between proto-Earth and Theia, believed to happened 4.5 billion years ago. Credit: NASA
Every planet in our Solar System has is shares of quirks, and Venus is no exception. She’s “Earth’s Sister”, and she’s prone to extreme temperatures that do not vary. And her orbit is the most stable of any planet, also with very little variation. You might say Venus is the extremely hot-tempered sibling of Earth, and very straight-laced to boot!
We’re always talking about Mars here on the Guide to Space. And with good reason. Mars is awesome, and there’s a fleet of spacecraft orbiting, probing and crawling around the surface of Mars.
The Red Planet is the focus of so much of our attention because it’s reasonably close and offers humanity a viable place for a second home. Well, not exactly viable, but with the right technology and techniques, we might be able to make a sustainable civilization there.
We have the surface of Mars mapped in great detail, and we know what it looks like from the surface.
But there’s another planet we need to keep in mind: Venus. It’s bigger, and closer than Mars. And sure, it’s a hellish deathscape that would kill you in moments if you ever set foot on it, but it’s still pretty interesting and mysterious to visit.
Would it surprise you to know that many spacecraft have actually made it down to the surface of Venus, and photographed the place from the ground? It was an amazing feat of Soviet engineering, and there are some new technologies in the works that might help us get back, and explore it longer.
Venera 10 image of Venusian surface (1975). 174-degree raw 6-bit logarithmically encoded telemetry seen above. Linearized and aperture corrected view in center, including data from a second 124-degree panorama. Bottom image had missing portions in-painted with Bertalmio’s algorithm.
Today, let’s talk about the Soviet Venera program. The first time humanity saw Venus from its surface.
Back in the 60s, in the height of the cold war, the Americans and the Soviets were racing to be the first to explore the Solar System. First satellite to orbit Earth (Soviets), first human to orbit Earth (Soviets), first flyby and landing on the Moon (Soviets), first flyby of Mars (Americans), first flyby of Venus (Americans), etc.
The Soviets set their sights on putting a lander down on the surface of Venus. But as we know, this planet has some unique challenges. Every place on the entire planet measures the same 462 degrees C (or 864 F).
Furthermore, the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is 90 times greater than Earth. Being down at the bottom of that column of atmosphere is the same as being beneath a kilometer of ocean on Earth. Remember those submarine movies where they dive too deep and get crushed like a soda can?
Finally, it rains sulphuric acid. I mean, that’s really irritating.
Needless to say, figuring this out took the Soviets a few tries.
The Venera 1 spacecraft
Their first attempts to even flyby Venus was Venera 1, on February 4, 1961. But it failed to even escape Earth orbit. This was followed by Venera 2, launched on November 12, 1965, but it went off course just after launch.
Venera 3 blasted off on November 16, 1965, and was intended to land on the surface of Venus. The Soviets lost communication with the spacecraft, but it’s believed it did actually crash land on Venus. So I guess that was the first successful “landing” on Venus?
Before I continue, I’d like to talk a little bit about landing on planets. As we’ve discussed in the past, landing on Mars is really really hard. The atmosphere is thick enough that spacecraft will burn up if you aim directly for the surface, but it’s not thick enough to let you use parachutes to gently land on the surface.
Landing on the surface of Venus on the other hand, is super easy. The atmosphere is so thick that you can use parachutes no problem. If you can get on target and deploy a parachute capable of handling the terrible environment, your soft landing is pretty much assured. Surviving down there is another story, but we’ll get to that.
Venera 4 came next, launched on June 12, 1967. The Soviet scientists had few clues about what the surface of Venus was actually like. They didn’t know the atmospheric pressure, guessing it might be a little higher pressure than Earth, or maybe it was hundreds of times our pressure. It was tested with high temperatures, and brutal deceleration. They thought they’d built this thing plenty tough.
The Venera 4 spacecraft. Venera spacecraft 3 to 6 were similar. Image supplied by NASA
Venera 4 arrived at Venus on October 18, 1967, and tried to survive a landing. Temperatures on its heat shield were clocked at 11,000 C, and it experienced 300 Gs of deceleration.
The initial temperature 52 km was a nice 33C, but then as it descended down towards the surface, temperatures increased to 262 C. And then, they lost contact with the probe, killed dead by the horrible temperature.
We can assume it landed, though, and for the first time, scientists caught a glimpse of just how bad it is down there on the surface of Venus.
Venera 5 was launched on January 5, 1969, and was built tougher, learning from the lessons of Venera 4. It also made it into Venus’ atmosphere, returned some interested science about the planet and then died before it reached the surface.
Venera 6 followed, same deal. Built tougher, died in the atmosphere, returned some useful science.
Venera 7 was built with a full understanding of how bad it was down there on Venus. It launched on August 17, 1970, and arrived in December. It’s believed that the parachutes on the spacecraft only partially deployed, allowing it to descend more quickly through the Venusian atmosphere than originally planned. It smacked into the surface going about 16.5 m/s, but amazingly, it survived, and continued to send back a weak signal to Earth for about 23 minutes.
For the first time ever, a spacecraft had made it down to the surface of Venus and communicated its status. I’m sure it was just 23 minutes of robotic screaming, but still, progress. Scientists got their first accurate measurement of the temperatures, and pressure down there.
Bottom line, humans could never survive on the surface of Venus.
Venera 8 blasted off for Venus on March 17, 1972, and the Soviet engineers built it to survive the descent and landing as long as possible. It made it through the atmosphere, landed on the surface, and returned data for about 50 minutes. It didn’t have a camera, but it did have a light sensor, which told scientists being on Venus was kind of like Earth on an overcast day. Enough light to take pictures… next time.
The Venera 9 spacecraft. Image supplied by NASA
For their next missions, the Soviets went back to the drawing board and built entirely new landing craft. Built big, heavy and tough, designed to get to the surface of Venus and survive long enough to send back data and pictures.
Venera 9 was launched on June 8, 1975. It survived the atmospheric descent and landed on the surface of Venus. The lander was built like a liquid cooled reverse insulated pressure vessel, using circulating fluid to keep the electronics cooled as long as possible. In this case, that was 53 minutes. Venera 9 measured clouds of acid, bromine and other toxic chemicals, and sent back grainy black and white television pictures from the surface of Venus.
In fact, these were the first pictures ever taken from the surface of another planet.
Images from Venera 9 (top) and Venera 10 (bottom). Public Domain Images, courtesy of NASA/National Space Science Data Center.
Venera 10 lasted for 65 minutes and took pictures of the surface with one camera. The lens cap on a second camera didn’t release. The spacecraft saw lava rocks with layers of other rocks in between. Similar environments that you might see here on Earth.
Venera 11 was launched on September 9, 1975 and lasted for 95 minutes on the surface of Venus. In addition to confirming the horrible environment discovered by the other landers, Venera 11 detected lightning strikes in the vicinity. It was equipped with a color camera, but again, the lens cap failed to deploy for it or the black and white camera. So it failed to send any pictures home.
Venera 12 was launched on September 14, 1978, and made it down to the surface of Venus. It lasted 110 minutes and returned detailed information about the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, both its camera lens caps failed to deploy, so no pictures were returned. And pictures are what we really care about, right?
Venera 13 was built on the same tougher, beefier design, and was blasted off to Venus on October 30, 1981, and this one was a tremendous success. It landed on Venus and survived for 127 minutes. It took pictures of its surroundings using two cameras peering through quartz windows, and saw a landscape of bedrock. It used spring-loaded arms to test out how compressible the soil was.
The surface of Venus as captured by Soviet Venera 13 lander in March of 1982. NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org
Venera 14 was identical and launched just 5 days after Venera 13. It also landed and survived for 57 minutes. Unfortunately, its experiment to test the compressibility of the soil was a botch because one of its lens caps landed right under its spring-loaded arm. But apart from that, it sent back color pictures of the hellish landscape.
And with that, the Soviet Venus landing program ended. And since then, no additional spacecraft have ever returned to the surface of Venus.
It’s one thing for a lander to make it to the surface of Venus, last a few minutes and then die from the horrible environment. What we really want is some kind of rover, like Curiosity, which would last on the surface of Venus for weeks, months or even years and do more science.
And computers don’t like this kind of heat. Go ahead, put your computer in the oven and set it to 850. Oh, your oven doesn’t go to 850, that’s fine, because it would be insane. Seriously, don’t do that, it would be bad.
Engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have developed a new kind of electrical circuitry that might be able to handle those kinds of temperatures. Their new circuits were tested in the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig, which can simulate the surface of Venus. It can mimic the temperature, pressure and even the chemistry of Venus’ atmosphere.
A before (top) and after (bottom) image of the electronics after being tested in the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig. Credit: NASA
The circuitry, originally designed for hot jet engines, lasted for 521 hours, functioning perfectly. If all goes well, future Venus rovers could be developed to survive on the surface of Venus without needing the complex and short lived cooling systems.
This discovery might unleash a whole new era of exploration of Venus, to confirm once and for all that it really does suck.
While the Soviets had a tough time with Mars, they really nailed it with Venus. You can see how they built and launched spacecraft after spacecraft, sticking with this challenge until they got the pictures and data they were looking for. I really think this series is one of the triumphs of robotic space exploration, and I look forward to future mission concepts to pick up where the Soviets left off.
Are you excited about the prospects of exploring Venus with rovers? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
A radar view of Venus taken by the Magellan spacecraft, with some gaps filled in by the Pioneer Venus orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL
Venus is known as Earth’s Sister Planet. It’s roughly the same size and mass as Earth, it’s our closest planetary neighbor, and Venus and Earth grew up together.
When you grow up with something, and it’s always been there, you kind of take it for granted. As a species, we occasionally glance over at Venus and go “Huh. Look at Venus.” Mars, exotic exoplanets in distant solar systems, and the strange gas giants and their moons in our own Solar System attract much more of our attention.
If a distant civilization searched our Solar System for potentially habitable planets, using the same criteria we do, then Venus would be front page news for them. It’s on the edge of the habitable zone and it has an atmosphere. But we know better. Venus is a hellish world, hot enough to melt lead, with crushing atmospheric pressure and acid rain falling from the sky. Even so, Venus still holds secrets we need to reveal.
Chief among those secrets is, “Why did Venus develop so differently?
Conditions on Venus pose unique challenges. The history of Venus exploration is littered with melted Soviet Venera Landers. Orbital probes like Pioneer 12 and Magellan have had more success recently, but Venus’ dense atmosphere still limits their effectiveness. Advances in materials, and especially in electronic circuitry that can withstand Venus’ heat, have buoyed our hopes of exploring the surface of Venus in greater detail.
The group acknowledged several over-arching questions we have about Venus:
How can we understand the atmospheric formation, evolution, and climate history?
How can we determine the evolution of the surface and interior?
How can we understand the nature of interior-surface-atmosphere interactions over time, including whether liquid water was ever present?
Since the Vision 2050 Workshop is all about the next 50 years, Cutts and his team looked at the challenges posed by Venus’ unique conditions, and how they could answer questions in the near-term, mid-term, and long-term.
Near Term Exploration (Present to 2019)
Near-Term goals for the exploration of Venus include improved remote-sensing from orbital probes. This will tell us more about the gravity and topography of Venus. Improved radar imaging and infrared imaging will fill in more blanks. The team also promoted the idea of a sustained aerial platform, a deep probe, and a short duration lander. Multiple probes/dropsondes are also part of the plan.
Dropsondes are small devices that are released into the atmosphere to measure winds, temperature, and humidity. They’re used on Earth to understand the weather, and extreme phenomena like hurricanes, and can fulfill the same purpose at Venus.
Dropsondes are released into the atmosphere, and their descent is slowed by a small parachute. As they descend, they gather data on temperature, wind, and humidity. Image By Staff Sgt. Randy Redman of the US Air Force
In the near-term, missions whose final destination is not Venus can also answer questions. Fly-bys by craft such as Bepi-Colombo, Solar Probe Plus, and the Solar Orbiter missions can give us good information on their way to Mercury and the Sun respectively. These missions will launch in 2018.
Bepi-Colombo, a joint mission of the ESA and JAXA, will perform two fly-bys of Venus on its way to Mercury. Image: ESA/JAXA
The ESO’s Venus Express and Japan’s Akatsuki, (Venus Climate Orbiter), have studied Venus’ climate in detail, especially its chemistry and the interactions between the atmosphere and the surface. Venus Express ended in 2015, while Akatsuki is still there.
Mid-Term Exploration (2020-2024)
The mid-term goals are more ambitious. They include a long-term lander to study Venus’ geophysical properties, a short-duration tessera lander, and two balloons.
The tesserae lander would land in a type of terrain found on Venus known as tesserae. We think that at one time, Venus had liquid water on it. The fundamental evidence for this may lie in the tesserae regions, but the terrain is extremely rough. A short duration lander that could land and operate in the tesserae regions would help us answer Venus’ liquid water question.
Thanks to the continued development of heat-hardy electronics, a long-term duration lander (months or more) is becoming more feasible in the mid-term. Ideally, any long-term mobile lander would be able to travel tens to hundreds of kilometers, in order to acquire a regional sample of Venus’ surface. This is the only way to take geochemistry and mineralogy measurements at multiple sites.
On Mars the landers are solar-powered. Venus’ thick atmosphere makes that impossible. But the same dense atmosphere that prohibits solar power might offer another solution: a sail-powered rover. Old-fashioned sail power might hold the key to moving around on the surface of Venus. Because the atmosphere is so dense, only a small sail would be necessary.
A simple sail-powered rover may solve the problem of mobility on the Venusian surface. Image: NASA
Long-Term Exploration (2025 and Beyond)
The long-term goals from Cutts and his team are where things get really interesting. A long-lived surface rover is still on the list, or possibly a near-surface craft like a balloon. Also on there is a long-lived seismic network.
A seismic network would really start to reveal the secrets behind Venus’ geophysical life. Whereas a lander would give us estimates of seismic activity, they would be crude compared to what a network of seismic sensors would reveal about Venus’ inner workings. A more thorough understanding of quake mechanisms and locations would really get the theorists buzzing. But it’s the final thing on the list that would be the end-goal. A sample-return mission.
We’re getting good at in situ measurements on other worlds. But for Venus, and for all the other worlds we have visited or want to visit, a sample return is the holy grail. The Apollo missions brought back hundreds of kilograms of lunar samples. Other sample-return missions have been sent to Phobos, which failed, and to asteroids, with varying degrees of success.
Subjecting a sample to the kind of deep analysis that can only be done on labs here on Earth is the end-game. We can keep analyzing samples as we develop new technologies to examine them with. Science is iterative, after all.
An artist’s image of Hayabusa leaving Earth. Hayabusa was a Japanese sample return mission to the asteroid 25143 Itokawa. The mission was a partial success. A sample mission to Earth’s sister planet is the holy-grail for the exploration of Venus. Image credit: JAXA
The 2003 Planetary Science Decadal Survey identified the importance of a sample return mission to Venus’ atmosphere. A balloon would float aloft in the clouds, and an ascending rocket would launch a collected sample back to Earth. According to Cutts and his team, this kind of sample-return mission could act as a stepping stone to a surface sample mission.
A surface sample would likely be the pinnacle of achievement when it comes to understanding Venus. But like most of the proposed goals for Venus, we’ll have to wait awhile.
The Changing Future
Cutts and the team acknowledge that the technology to enable exploration of Venus is in flux. No more missions to Venus are planned before 2020. There’ve been proposals for things like sail powered landers, but we’re not there yet. We’re developing heat-resistant electronics, but so far they’re very simple. There’s a lot of work to do.
On the other hand, some things may happen sooner. It may turn out that we can learn about Venusian seismic activity from balloon-borne or orbital sensors. The team says that “Due to strong mechanical coupling between the atmosphere and ground, seismic waves are launched into the atmosphere, where they may be detected by infrasound on a balloon or infrared or ultraviolet signatures from orbit.” That’s thanks to Venus’ dense atmosphere. That means that the far-term goal of seismic sensing of the interior of Venus could be shifted to the near-term or mid-term.
Japan’s Akatsuki orbiter captured this image of a gravity wave in Venus’ upper cloud layer. Could orbiter sensors remove the need for a network of seismic sensors on the surface? Image credit: JAXA
As work on nanosatellites and cubesats continues, they may play a larger role at Venus, and shift the timelines. NASA wants to include these small satellites on every launch where there is a few kilograms of excess capacity. A group of these nanosatellites could form a network of seismic sensors much more easily and much sooner than an established network of surface sensors. A network of nanosatellites could also serve as a communications relay for other missions.
Venus doesn’t generate a lot of buzz these days. The discovery of Earth-like worlds in distant solar systems generates headline after headline. And the always popular search for life is centered on Mars, and the icy/sub-surface moons of our Solar System’s gas giants. But Venus is still a tantalizing target, and understanding Venus’ evolution will help us understand what we’re seeing in distant solar systems.
Venus and Earth have many similarities. Both are terrestrial planets, meaning that they are composed predominately of metal and silicate rock, which is differentiated between a metal core and a silicate mantle and crust. Both also orbit the Sun within its habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks Zone“). Hence why Venus and Earth are often called “sister planets”.
However, Venus is also starkly different from Earth in a number of ways. It’s atmosphere, which is composed primarily of carbon dioxide and small amounts of nitrogen, is 92 times as dense as Earth’s. It is also the hottest planet in the Solar System, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead! And on top of all that, a year on Venus is much different than a year on Earth.
Orbital Period:
Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 0.72 AU (108,000,000 km/67,000,000 mi) with almost no eccentricity. In fact, with its farthest orbit (aphelion) of 0.728 AU (108,939,000 km) and closest orbit (perihelion) of 0.718 AU (107,477,000 km), it has the most circular orbit of any planet in the Solar System.
Earth and Venus’ orbit compared. Credit: Sky and Telescope
The planet’s orbital period is 224.65 days, which means that a year on Venus is 61.5% as long as a year on Earth. Unlike most other planets in the Solar System, which rotate on their axes in an counter-clockwise direction, Venus rotates clockwise (called “retrograde” rotation). It also rotates very slowly, taking 243 Earth days to complete a single rotation.
Sidereal vs. Solar Day:
While a year on Venus lasts the equivalent of 224.65 Earth days, it only lasts the equivalent 1.92 days on Venus. This is due to the fact that Venus rotates quick slowly and in the opposite direction of its orbit. Because of this, a Solar Day – the time it takes for the Sun to rise, set, and return to the same place in the sky – takes 116.75 Earth days.
This means, in effect, that a single day on Venus lasts over half a year. In other words, in the space of just over a single Venusian year, the Sun will appear to have circled the heavens twice. In addition, to someone standing on the planet’s surface, the Sun would appear to rise in the west and set in the east.
Variations:
Because of its dense atmosphere and its highly circular rotation, Venus experiences very little in the way of temperature variations during the course of a year. Similarly, its axial tilt of 2.64° (compared to Earth’s 23.44°) is the second-lowest in the Solar System, behind Mercury’s extremely low tilt of 0.03.
This means that there is virtually no variation in Venus’ surface temperature between day and night, or the equator and the poles. All year long, the mean surface temperature of Venus is a scorching 735 K (462 °C/863.6 °F), with the only variations occurring as a result of elevation.
Yes, Venus is a truly hellish place. And unfortunately, that’s a year-round phenomena! The days are extremely hot, the nights extremely hot, and a day lasts over half as long as a year. So if you’re planning on vacationing somewhere, might we recommend somewhere a little less sunny and balmy?
The planet Venus, as imaged by the Magellan 10 mission. The planet's inhospitable surface makes exploration extremely difficult. Credit: NASA/JPL
Venus is often described as being hell itself, because of its crushing pressure, acidic atmosphere, and extremely high temperatures. Dealing with any one of these is a significant challenge when it comes to exploring Venus. Dealing with all three is extremely daunting, as the Soviet Union discovered with their Venera landers.
Actually, dealing with the sulphuric rain is not too difficult, but the heat and the pressure on the surface of Venus are huge hurdles to exploring the planet. NASA has been working on the Venus problem, trying to develop electronics that can survive long enough to do useful science. And it looks like they’re making huge progress.
Scientists at the NASA Glenn Research Centre have demonstrated electronic circuitry that should help open up the surface of Venus to exploration.
The first color pictures taken of the surface of Venus by the Venera-13 space probe. The Venera 13 probe lasted only 127 minutes before succumbing to Venus’s extreme surface environment. Credit: NASA
“With further technology development, such electronics could drastically improve Venus lander designs and mission concepts, enabling the first long-duration missions to the surface of Venus,” said Phil Neudeck, lead electronics engineer for this work.
With our current technology, landers can only withstand surface conditions on Venus for a few hours. You can’t do much science in a few hours, especially when weighed against the mission cost. So increasing the survivability of a Venus lander is crucial.
With a temperature of 460 degrees Celsius (860 degrees Fahrenheit), Venus is almost twice as hot as most ovens. It’s hot enough to melt lead, in fact. Not only that, but the surface pressure on Venus is about 90 times greater than Earth’s, because the atmosphere is so dense.
To protect the electronics on previous Venus landers, they have been contained inside special vessels designed to withstand the pressure and temperature. But these vessels add a lot of mass to the mission, and make sending landers to Venus a very expensive proposition. So NASA’s work on robust electronics is super important when it comes to exploring Venus.
The team at the Glenn Research Centre has developed silicon carbide semiconductor integrated circuits (Si C IC) that are extremely robust. Two of the circuits were tested inside a special chamber designed to precisely reproduce the conditions on Venus. This chamber is called the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig (GEER.)
The GEER (Glenn Extreme Environments Rig) facility can recreate the conditions of any body in our Solar System. (No, not the Sun, obviously.) Image: NASA/Glenn Research Centre
GEER is a special chamber that can recreate the conditions on any body in our Solar System. It’s an 800 Litre (28 cubic foot) chamber that can simulate temperatures up to 500° C (932° F), and pressures from near-vacuum to over 90 times the surface pressure of Earth. GEER can also simulate exotic atmospheres with its precision gas-mixing capabilities. It can mix very specific quantities of gases down to parts per million accuracy. For these tests, that means the unit had to reproduce an accurate recipe of CO2, N2, SO2, HF, HCl, CO, OCS, H2S, and H2O, down to very tiny quantities. And the tests were a success.
“We demonstrated vastly longer electrical operation with chips directly exposed — no cooling and no protective chip packaging — to a high-fidelity physical and chemical reproduction of Venus’ surface atmosphere,” Neudeck said. “And both integrated circuits still worked after the end of the test.”
In fact, the two circuits not only functioned after the test was completed, but they withstood Venus-like conditions for 521 hours. That’s more than 100 times longer than previous demonstrations of electronics designed for Venus missions.
A before (top) and after (bottom) image of the electronics after being tested in Venus atmospheric conditions. Image: NASA
The circuits themselves were originally designed to operate in the extremely high temperatures inside aircraft engines. “This work not only enables the potential for new science in extended Venus surface and other planetary exploration, but it also has potentially significant impact for a range of Earth relevant applications, such as in aircraft engines to enable new capabilities, improve operations, and reduce emissions,” said Gary Hunter, principle investigator for Venus surface electronics development.”
The chips themselves were very simple. They weren’t prototypes of any specific electronics that would be equipped on a Venus lander. What these tests showed is that the new Silicon Carbide Integrated Circuits (Si C IC) can withstand the conditions on Venus.
A host of other challenges remains when it comes to the overall success of a Venus lander. All of the equipment that has to operate there, like sensors, drills, and atmospheric samplers, still has to survive the thermal expansion from exposure to extremely high temperature. Robust new designs will be required in many cases. But this successful test of electronics that can survive without bulky, heavy, protective enclosures is definitely a leap forward.
If you’re interested in what a Venus lander might look like, check out the Venus Sail Rover concept.
A radar view of Venus taken by the Magellan spacecraft, with some gaps filled in by the Pioneer Venus orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL
Venus is often referred to as “Earth’s Sister” planet, because of the various things they have in common. For example, both planets reside within our Sun’s habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks Zone“). In addition, Earth and Venus are also terrestrial planets, meaning they are primarily composed of metals and silicate rock that are differentiated between a metallic core and a silicate mantle and crust.
Beyond that, Earth and Venus could not be more different. And two ways in which they are in stark contrast is the time it takes for the Sun to rise, set, and return to the same place in the sky (i.e. one day). In Earth’s case, this process takes a full 24 hours. But in Venus’ case, its slow rotation and orbit mean that a single day lasts as long as 116.75 Earth days.
Sidereal Vs. Solar:
Naturally, some clarification is necessary when addressing the question of how long a day lasts. For starters, one must distinguish between a sidereal day and a solar day. A sidereal day is the time it takes for a planet to complete a single rotation on its axis. On the other hand, a solar day is the time it takes for the Sun to return to the same place in the sky.
On Earth, a sidereal days last 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds, whereas a solar day lasts exactly 24 hours. In Venus’ case, it takes a whopping 243.025 days for the planet to rotate once on its axis – which is the longest rotational period of any planet in the Solar System. In addition, it rotates in the opposite the direction in which it orbits around the Sun (which it takes about 224.7 Earth days to complete).
In other words, Venus has a retrograde rotation, which means that if you could view the planet from above its northern polar region, it would be seen to rotate in a clockwise direction on its axis, and in a counter-clockwise direction around the Sun. It also means that if you could stand on the surface of Venus, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east.
From all this, one might assume that a single day lasts longer than a year on Venus. But again, the distinction between a sidereal and solar days means that this is not true. Combined with its orbital period, the time it takes for the Sun to return to the same point in the sky works out to 116.75 Earth days, which is little more than a half a Venusian (or Cytherian) year.
At a closest average distance of 41 million km (25,476,219 mi), Venus is the closest planet to Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL/Magellan
Axial Tilt and Temperatures:
Unlike Earth or Mars, Venus has a very low axial tilt – just 2.64° relative to the ecliptic. In fact, it’s axial tilt is the one of the lowest in the Solar System, second only to Mercury (which has an extremely low tilt of 0.03°). Combined with its slow rotational period and dense atmosphere, this results in the planet being effectively isothermal, with virtually no variation in its surface temperature.
In other words, the planet experiences a mean temperature of 735 K (462 °C; 863.6 °F) – the hottest in the Solar System – with very little change between day and night, or between the equator and the poles. In addition, the planet experiences minimal seasonal temperature variation, with the only appreciable variations occurring with altitude.
Weather Patterns:
It is a well-known fact that Venus’ atmosphere is incredibly dense. In fact, the mass of Venus atmosphere is 93 times that of Earth’s, and the air pressure at the surface is estimated to be as high as 92 bar – i.e. 92 times that of Earth’s at sea level. If it were possible for a human being to stand on the surface of Venus, they would be crushed by the atmosphere.
The composition of the atmosphere is extremely toxic, consisting primarily of carbon dioxide (96.5%) with small amounts of nitrogen (3.5%) and traces of other gases – most notably sulfur dioxide. Combined with its density, the composition generates the strongest greenhouse effect of any planet in the Solar System.
According to multiple Earth-based surveys and space missions to Venus, scientists have learned that its weather is rather extreme. The entire atmosphere of the planet circulates around quickly, with winds reaching speeds of up to 85 m/s (300 km/h; 186.4 mph) at the cloud tops, which circle the planet every four to five Earth days.
At this speed, these winds move up to 60 times the speed of the planet’s rotation, whereas Earth’s fastest winds are only 10-20% of the planet’s rotational speed. Spacecraft equipped with ultraviolet imaging instruments are able to observe the cloud motion around Venus, and see how it moves at different layers of the atmosphere. The winds blow in a retrograde direction, and are the fastest near the poles.
Closer to the equator, the wind speeds die down to almost nothing. Because of the thick atmosphere, the winds move much slower as you get close to the surface of Venus, reaching speeds of about 5 km/h. Because it’s so thick, though, the atmosphere is more like water currents than blowing wind at the surface, so it is still capable of blowing dust around and moving small rocks across the surface of Venus.
Venus flybys have also indicated that its dense clouds are capable of producing lightning, much like the clouds on Earth. Their intermittent appearance indicates a pattern associated with weather activity, and the lightning rate is at least half of that on Earth.
Artist concept of the surface of Venus, showing its dense clouds and lightning storms. Credit: NASA
Yes, Venus is a planet of extremes. Extreme heat, extreme weather, and extremely long days! In short, there’s a reason why nobody lives there. But who knows? Given the right kind of technology, and perhaps even some dedicated terraforming efforts, people could one day being watching the Sun rising in the west and setting in the east.
Every few months a bright star appears in the sky. Sometimes it’s off to the East, bright in the morning before the Sun rises. Other times, you can see it in the West right after the Sun sets.
Experienced stargazers know this isn’t a star at all, of course, it’s Venus. That horrible twin planet, surrounded by a toxic choking atmosphere of superheated carbon dioxide. For a while it becomes the fourth brightest object in the sky: after the Sun, Moon and the International Space Station, if you can believe it.
In dark skies, Venus gets so bright you can even read a book to it.
Inexperienced stargazers, however, suddenly notice this super bright star in the sky. How come they never noticed it before? Was it always right next to the Moon like that? And that’s when the UFO calls to 911 start up.
Credit: nosha (CC BY-SA 2.0)
I know none of them are going to be watching this video. But for everyone else, even mildly interested in the science here, let’s dig into the orbit of Venus, how we finally figured out what that thing is, how you can observe the planet, and some cool tricks Venus can do.
We’ve written several articles on what planet Venus actually is, and why it sucks so much. You know, a runaway greenhouse effect giving the planet 90 times the Earth’s atmospheric pressure at the surface. It’s a 462-degree furnace, anywhere you go, with a rain of sulfuric acid.
A radar view of Venus taken by the Magellan spacecraft, with some gaps filled in by the Pioneer Venus orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL
Nope, we’re not going to talk about visiting that place. Instead, we’re just going to talk about looking at it from afar, and how it changed our whole understanding about our place in the Solar System.
Venus is, of course, the second planet from the Sun. But for the vast majority of human history, nobody really understood what it was. It’s easy to see in the sky, even if you live in one of the most light polluted cities on Earth.
Ancient civilizations tried to grapple with what they were looking at, and of course, they assumed there was something supernatural going on. Probably dark and vengeful gods wandering through the heavens, staring down at us with their beady eyes. Judging, always judging. Some civilizations figured out that it’s a single object, while others believed they were looking at two separate entities.
The Ancient Greeks, for example, called the morning edition of Venus Phosphoros, the “Bringer of Light”, and they called the evening star Hesperos, the, uh, “Star of the Evening”. Then they realized it was a single object, and upgraded it to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The Romans turned that into Venus, and the name stuck.
Andreas Cellarius’s illustration of the Copernican system, from the Harmonia Macrocosmica (1708). Credit: Public Domain
The ancient astronomers assumed the Earth was the center of the Universe, and all the planets and even the Sun and stars revolved around us. but Nicholas Copernicus worked out the true nature of the Solar System in the early 16th century. The Sun was at the center of the Solar System, and all planets, including Earth, orbited around it.
It was a cool story, and nicely fit the motions of the planets, however, the best evidence came almost a century later when Galileo turned his first crude telescope to Venus and realized that the planet goes through phases, just like the Moon. In fact, with a small telescope, you can confirm this all for yourself.
Each of the planets orbit the Sun. Mercury and Venus orbit closer to the Sun, then Earth, then the rest of the planets. When we observe Venus, we look inwards, down towards the Sun. When we see the rest of the planets, we’re looking outward, away from the Sun.
The best analogy is a car race. If you’re in the stands watching those cars go around and around, you’re turning your head back and forth as the cars pointlessly circle in front of you. But to see cars in the ring road around the racetrack, you’ll need to look all the way round you. Make sense?
The orbits of Earth and Venus around the Sun. Credit: Universe Sandbox ²
Here’s a simplified version of the Solar System, with just the Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Earth, as you probably know, takes just over 365 days to go around the Sun, while Venus only takes 225 days to complete an orbit.
Which means that Venus completes more than 3 orbits every time Earth completes 2. Which means that we’re always seeing Venus from different angles compared to the Sun.
Sometimes it’s on the same side of the Sun as us. Other times it’s on the opposite. And sometimes Venus is on one side of the Sun, or the other. For about 9 and a half months, Venus is the evening star, brightening to its maximum, and then it spends another 9 and a half months as the morning star.
When all three are lined up, astronomers call that a conjunction. It’s a superior conjunction if Venus is on the opposite side of the Sun, and an inferior conjunction if it’s between us and the Sun.
When Venus is on either side, we measure its elongation, eastern or western. Because Venus orbits close to the Sun, the absolute maximum it can get is 47-degrees elongation. Make a triangle, where you point one line at the Sun, and another line at Venus, the angle of this triangle can’t get any bigger than 47-degrees.
And this is why we always see Venus relatively close to the Sun in the sky. There are 360 total degrees you can look, but Venus never leaves 90 of them.
The phases of Venus. Credit: Statis Kalyvas – VT-2004 programme
Now, onto the phases. Just like the Moon, when Venus is in between us and the Sun, then all the light is falling on the far side of Venus. The side facing towards the Sun, but facing away from us. Of course, Venus is also hidden by the glare of the Sun, which means we really can’t even see it. The opposite happens when it’s on the other side of the Sun. It would be fully illuminated from our perspective. Too bad we can’t see it in all that glare.
But when Venus is on either side, this is when we can finally see it. As our perspective changes, we’re seeing more and more of the planet illuminated, and less in shadow. We see phases. We can see a crescent Venus, or a quarter Venus, or a gibbous Venus.
When Venus is almost fully illuminated, it’s actually at its dimmest because it’s so far away. Then as it moves higher and higher in the sky, we see less of it illuminated, but more overall surface area, so it gets brighter. The point of maximum brightness, when it’s blazing brighter than almost any other object in the sky is when the greatest amount of surface area of Venus is visible to us. Astronomers call this the greatest illuminated extent.
Venus is beautiful in the evening right now as I’m recording this video. We won’t see it this bright in the evening sky until August 2017, and then March, 2020. So, get out and enjoy it while you can.
When Venus passes directly in front of the Sun, that’s a planetary transit. The last time it happened was back in 2012, and before that, 2004. Unfortunately, the next transit of Venus won’t happen until 2117. I’m sure I’ll be still around, living it up in my robot body.
You’d might wonder why they don’t line up every time Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun. That’s because both Earth and Venus are slightly tilted in their orbits. Sometimes we see Venus above the Sun when it’s directly across from us, other times it’s below the Sun. It’s only after more than 100 years they directly line up again.
A planetary transit of Venus. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO
It turns out that transits of Venus gave us some of the most valuable discoveries in human history.
Today we know that the Sun is approximately 150 million kilometers away. But for the longest time we had no idea how far away the planets are. We know how far away everything is in proportion to everything else, but not in absolute terms.
In 1663, the Scottish mathematician James Gregory calculated that by making very precise measurements of the transits of Venus or Mercury, you could use trigonometry to figure out the actual distance from the Earth to the Sun. The famed astronomer Edumund Halley did even more detailed calculations and suggesedt places on the Earth to make measurements from.
It wasn’t until the 1700s that astronomers got organized enough to make worldwide measurements during a transit of Venus.
Astronomers tried to observe the Venus transit of 1761, but the weather conditions were pretty bad. In the 1769 transit, however, astronomers were sent to various corners of the globe. In Canada, Norway and the South Pacific. Nations fighting each other allowed astronomers safe passage through on ships through the warzone.
All of the observers made 4 observations: when Venus was touching the edge of the Sun, when it was fully inside, when it had touched the other side, and when it was fully out.
By combining all these measurements across the Earth, astronomers calculated that the distance from the Earth to the Sun was 93,726,900 English miles. The most accurate number we have today is 92,955,000 miles, or about 150 million kilometers. They were only off by about 1%. Not bad.
Once we knew the distance from the Earth to the Sun, we could calculate the distance to the other planets, even to other stars. All thanks to Venus.
Venus is one of the most dependable companions we have in the night sky. Sure, it’s a hellish death world, but from our perspective here on Earth, it’s really cool to look at. Don’t miss the next opportunity to see Venus with your own eyeballs. And if you can, get your hands on a telescope and see the planet going through its phases. You won’t regret it.
Did you get a chance to see the last transit of Venus, back in 2012? Give me the details of your experience in the comments.
Venus, Mars, and the waxing crescent moon at dusk from the evening of January 3rd, 2017. Image credit and copyright: Alan Dyer.
Venus, Mars, and the waxing crescent Moon at dusk from the evening of January 3rd, 2017. Image credit and copyright: Alan Dyer.
“What’s that bright light in the sky?” The planet Venus never fails to impress, and indeed makes even seasoned observers look twice at its unexpected brilliance. The third brightest natural object in the sky, Venus now rules the dusk, a fine sight for wintertime evening commuters. Venus reaches greatest elongation tomorrow, a excellent time to admire this dazzling but shrouded world of mystery.
Venus at greatest elongation
Only the two planets interior to Earth’s orbit – Mercury and Venus – can reach a point known as greatest elongation from the Sun. As the name suggests, this is simply the point at which either planet appears to be at its maximum angular distance from the Sun. Think of a big right triangle in space, with Venus or Mercury at the right angle vertex, and the Sun and Earth at the other two corners. High school geometry can come in handy!
Venus at greatest elongation (planets and orbits not to scale). Credit: Dave Dickinson
This Thursday on January 12th Venus reaches a maximum of 47 degrees elongation from the Sun at 11:00 Universal Time (UT) / 6:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, shining at magnitude -4.4. The maximum/minimum elongation for Venus that can occur is 47.3 to 45.4 degrees respectively, and this week’s is the widest until 2025.
Here’s some key dates to watch out for:
Jan 12th: Venus passes less than a degree from Neptune.
Jan 14th: Venus reaches theoretical dichotomy?
Jan 14th: Venus passes 3′ from +3.7 the magnitude star Lambda Aquarii.
Jan 17th: Venus crosses the ecliptic plane northward.
Venus and Mars reach ‘quasi-conjunction’ in late January.
January 30th: Venus crosses the celestial equator northward.
January 31st: The Moon passes 4 degrees south of Venus, and the two also form a nice equilateral triangle with Mars on the same date.
Looking west on the evening of January 31st, 2017. Image credit: Stellarium.
February 17th: Venus reaches a maximum brilliancy of magnitude -4.6.
March 26th: Solar conjunction for Venus occurs eight degrees north of the Sun … it is possible to spy Venus at solar conjunction from high northern latitudes, just be sure to block out the Sun.
Through the telescope, Venus displays a tiny 24.4” size half phase right around greatest elongation. You could stack 74 Venuses across the diameter of tomorrow’s Full Moon. When does Venus look to reach an exact half phase to you? This point, known as theoretical dichotomy, is often off by just a few days. This is a curious observed phenomenon, first noted by German amateur astronomer Johann Schröter in 1793. The effect now bears his name. A result of atmospheric refraction along the day/terminator on Venus, or an optical illusion?
Almost there… a waning gibbous Venus from the evening of January 5th, 2017. Image credit and copyright: Shahrin Ahmad (@Shahgazer)
And hey, amateurs are now using ultraviolet filters to get actual detail on the cloud-tops of Venus… we like to use a variable polarizing filter to cut down the dazzling glare of Venus a bit at the eyepiece.
Also, keep an eye out for another strange phenomenon, known as the Ashen Light of Venus. Now,ashen light or Earthshine is readily apparent on dark side of the Moon, owing to the presence of a large sunlight reflector nearby, namely the Earth. Venus has no such large partner, though astronomers in the early age of telescopic astronomy claimed to have spied a moon of Venus, and even went as far as naming it Neith. An optical illusion? Or real evidence of Venusian sky glow on its nighttime side? After tomorrow, Venus will begin heading between the Earth and the Sun, becoming a slender crescent in the process. Solar conjunction occurs on March 25th, 2017. Venus sits just eight degrees north of the Sun on this date, and viewers in high Arctic latitudes might just be able to spy Venus above the horizon before sunrise on the day of solar conjunction. We performed a similar feat of visual athletics on the morning of January 16th, 1998 observing from North Pole, Alaska.
Venus as seen from Fairbanks, Alaska on the morning of solar conjunction, 2017. Image credit: Starry Night.
From there, Venus heads towards a fine dawn elongation on June 3rd, 2017. All of these events and more are detailed in our free e-book: 101 Astronomical Events for 2017.
Spying Venus in the Daytime
Did you know: you can actually see Venus in the daytime, if you know exactly where to look for it? A deep blue, high contrast sky is the key, and a nearby crescent Moon is handy in your daytime quest. Strange but true fact: Venus is actually brighter than the Moon per square arc second, with a shiny albedo of 70% versus the Moon’s paltry 12%. But Venus is tiny, and hard to spot against the blue daytime sky… until you catch sight of it.
The Moon passing Venus on January 31st, 2017 in the daytime sky. Image credit: Stellarium.
There’s another reason to brave the January cold for northern hemisphere residents: Venus can indeed cast a shadow if you look carefully for it. You’ll need to be away from any other light sources (including the Moon, which passes Full tomorrow as well with the first Full Moon of 2017, known as a Full Wolf Moon). And a high contrast surface such as freshly fallen snow can help… a short time exposure shot can even bring the shadow cast by Venus into focus.
If you follow Venus long enough, you’ll notice a pattern, as it visits very nearly the the same sky environs every eight years and traces out approximately the same path in the dawn and dusk sky. There’s a reason for this: 8 Earth years (8x 365.25 = 2922 days) very nearly equals 5 the synodic periods for Venus (2922/5=584 days, the number of days it takes Venus to return to roughly the same point with respect to the starry background, separate from its true orbit around the Sun of 225 days). For example, Venus last crossed the Pleiades star cluster in 2012, and will do so again in – you guessed it — in 2020. Unfortunately, this pattern isn’t precise, and Venus won’t also transit the Sun again in 2020 like it did in 2012. You’ll have to wait until one century from this year on December 10-11th, 2117 to see that celestial spectacle again….
Hopefully, we’ll have perfected that whole Futurama head-in-a-jar thing by then.
As soon as people learn how inhospitable Mars, Venus, and really the entire Solar System are, they want to know how we can fix it. There’s a word for fixing a planet to make it more like Earth: terraforming.
If you want to fix Mars, all you have to do is thicken and warm up its atmosphere to the point that Earth life could survive. You’d need to do the opposite with Venus, cooling it down and reducing the atmospheric pressure.
But it’s hard to wrap your brain around the scale it would take to do such a thing. We’re talking about an incomprehensible amount of atmosphere to try and modify. The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is 90 times the pressure of Earth. It’s carbon dioxide, so you need some chemical, like magnesium or calcium to lock it away. If you can mine, for example, 4 times the mass of asteroid Vesta, it should be possible.
Credit: NASA/Pat Rawlings
No, from our perspective, that’s practically impossible. In fact, it’s kind of ironic, when you consider the fact that we’re making our own planet less habitable to human civilization every day.
There’s another path to making another world habitable, however, and that’s changing life itself to be more adaptable to surviving on another world.
Instead of terraforming a planet, what if we terraformed ourselves?
Actually, that’s a really bad term. We’d really be changing ourselves to be better adapted to living on Mars. So we’d be Marsiforming ourselves? Venisfying ourselves? Okay, I’ll need to work on the terminology. But you get the gist.
Life, of course, has been evolving and adapting on Earth for at least 4.1 billion years. Pretty much as soon as life could arise on Earth, it did. And those early lifeforms went on to modify and change, adapting to every environment on our planet, from the deepest oceans, to the mountains. From the deserts to the icy tundra.
But in the last few thousand years, we’ve taken a driving role in the evolution of life for the domesticated plants and animals we eat and care for. Your pet dog looks vastly different from the wolf ancestor it evolved from. We’ve increased the yield of corn and wheat, adapted fruit and vegetables, and turned chickens into flightless mobile breast meat.
And in the last few decades, we’ve gained the most powerful new tools for adapting life to our needs: genetic modification. Instead of waiting for evolution and selective breeding to get the results we need, we can rewrite the genetic code of lifeforms, borrowing beneficial traits from life over here, and jamming it into the code of life over there. What doesn’t get cooler when it glows in the dark? Nothing, that’s what.
Can we adapt Earth life to live on Mars? It turns out, our toughest life isn’t that far off. During the American Society for Microbiology meeting in 2015, researchers presented how well tough bacteria would be able to handle the conditions on Mars. They found that 4 species of methanogens might actually be able to survive below the surface, consuming hydrogen and carbon dioxide and releasing methane.
It would still look like a desolate wasteland, but there would be life on Mars even if we have to put it there ourselves. Credit: NASA/JPL
In other words, under the right conditions, there are forms of Earth life that can survive on Mars right now. In fact, as we continue to explore Mars, and learn that it’s wetter than we ever thought, we risk infecting the planet with our own microbial life accidentally.
But when we imagine life on Mars, we’re not thinking about a few hardy methanogens, struggling for life beneath the briny regolith. No, we imagine plants, trees, and little animals scurrying about.
Do we have anything close there that we could adapt?
It turns out there are strains of lichen, the symbiosis of fungi and algae that could stand a chance. You’ve probably seen lichen on rocks and other places that suck for any other lifeform. But according to Jean-Pierre de Vera, with the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, Germany, there are Earth-based lichen which are tough enough.
They put lichen into a test environment that simulated the surface of Mars: low atmospheric pressure, carbon dioxide atmosphere, freezing cold temperatures and high radiation. The only things they couldn’t simulate were galactic radiation and low gravity.
What’s not to lichen about this plan? Credit: Roantrum (CC BY 2.0)
In the harshest conditions, the lichen was barely able to hang on and survive, but in milder Mars conditions, protected within rock cracks, the lichen continued to carry out its regular photosynthesis.
It seems that lichen too is ready to go to Mars.
Methanogens and hardy lichen don’t make for the most thrilling forest canopy. In a second, I’m going to talk about what we can do to tweak life to survive and thrive on Mars. But first, I’d like to thank Zach Kanzler, Jeremy Payne, James Craver, Mike Janzen, and the rest of our 709 patrons for their generous support. If you love what we’re doing and want to help out, head over to patreon.com/universetoday.
If our current life isn’t going to get the job done, well then we’re just going to need to adapt it ourselves. Just like we’ve done in the past, with breeding and more recently with rewriting the DNA itself.
Without dramatically changing the environment of Mars to thicken its atmosphere and boost its temperatures, it’s inconceivable to think that we’ll ever adapt anything more complex than bacteria or lichen to survive outside on Mars. But if those give us a toehold, and other techniques can improve the environment, it’s possible to take incremental steps in that direction.
Engineering concept of a plant growth module. Credit: NASA/Langley
Even within the protected environments of Martian colonies, our current plants and animals probably aren’t up to the task.
The regolith on Mars, for example, contains toxic perchlorates that would kill any Earth-based plants that would try to grow in it. There are Earth-based lifeforms that love perchlorates and it should be possible to create organisms that will strip this toxin out of the regolith and turn it into something useful, like rocket fuel.
Earth-based plants and animals evolved in a 24-hour daily cycle, but a day on Mars is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. We could grow plants with artificial light, but if we want to use natural Martian light, some adaptation might be required.
Perhaps the biggest risk we face to living on Mars, the one that our technology really can’t help us with is the lower gravity. We don’t know if living in 38% gravity for generations is going to be good for us. We know we can run around on the surface for a few years, but can pregnancy carry to term in this lower gravity?
We just don’t know. In order to find out safely, we’ll need to create rotating space station colonies, where we vary the artificial gravity and see what happens with animals over multiple generations with lower gravity.
A NASA artist’s concept of a vehicle which could provide an artificial-gravity environment of Mars exploration crews. The piloted vehicle rotates around the axis that contains the solar panels. Levels of artificial gravity vary according to the tether length and the rate at which the vehicle spins. Credit: NASA
If there are health problems, we can take the results of these experiments, and modify genetic code to have better adaptation to this environment. And since humans are animals too, the lessons we learn will help us adapt ourselves to be better prepared to survive on Mars, forever.
Here’s a link to an awesome video from Kurzgesagt about the state of genetic engineering, and the amazing technology that’s just around the corner.
If we are able to change humans to live on Mars, we can probably do the same with other worlds. Image a far future, where human colonies on different worlds are adapted to survive there, using a mixture of technology and genetic manipulation. This will be good and bad. On the good side, human colonies will be able to survive over many generations. On the bad side, they might never be able to live anywhere else in the Solar System without going through the whole adaptation process again.
Would you be willing to change your body permanently to be better adapted to live on another world? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
45P/H-M-P displays a colorful coma and long ion tail on Dec. 22, 2016. Credit: Gerald Rhemann
Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova captured in its glory on Dec. 22, 2016. It displays a bright, well-condensed blue-green coma and long ion or gas tail pointing east. Comet observers take note: a Swan Band filter shows a larger coma and increases the comet’s contrast. Credit: Gerald Rhemann
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays all! I hope the day finds you in the company of family or friends and feeling at peace. While we’ve been shopping for gifts the past few weeks, a returning comet has been brightening up in the evening sky. Named 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova, it returns to the hood every 5.25 years after vacationing beyond the planet Jupiter. It’s tempting to blow by the name and see only a jumble of letters, but let’s try to pronounce it: HON-da — MUR-Koz — PIE-doo-sha-ko-vah. Not too hard, right?
Tonight, the comet will appear about 12. 5 degrees to the west of Venus in central Capricornus. You can spot it near the end of evening twilight. Use larger binoculars or a telescope. Stellarium
Comet 45P is a short period comet — one with an orbital period of fewer than 200 years — discovered on December 3, 1948 by Minoru Honda along with co-discoverers Antonin Mrkos and Ludmila Pajdusakova. Three names are the maximum a comet can have even if 15 people simultaneously discover it. 45P has a history of brightening rapidly as it approaches the sun, and this go-round is proof. A faint nothing a few weeks back, the comet’s now magnitude +7.5 and visible in 50mm or larger binoculars from low light pollution locations.
You can catch it right around the end of dusk this week and next as it arcs across central Capricornus not far behind the brilliant planet Venus. 45P will look like a dim, fuzzy star in binoculars, but if you can get a telescope on it, you’ll see a fluffy, round coma, a bright, star-like center and perhaps even a faint spike of a tail sticking out to the east. Time exposure photos reveal a tail at least 3° long and a gorgeous, aqua-tinted coma. I saw the color straight off when observing the comet several nights ago in my 15-inch reflector at low power (64x).
Use this map to help you follow the comet night to night. Tick marks start this evening (Dec. 25) and show its nightly position through Jan. 8 around 6 p.m. local time or about an hour and 15 minutes after sunset. Venus, at upper left, is shown through the 28th with stars to magnitude +7. Click the chart for a larger version you can save and print out for use at your telescope. Created with Chris Marriott’s SkyMap software
Right now, and for the remainder of its evening apparition, 45P will never appear very high in the southwestern sky. Look for it a little before the end of evening twilight, when the sky is reasonably dark and the comet is as high as it gets — about a fist above the horizon as seen from mid-northern latitudes. That’s pretty low, so make the best of your time. I recommend you being around 1 hour 15 minutes after sunset.
The further south you live, the higher 45P will appear. To a point. It hovers low at nightfall this month and next. That will change in February when the comet pulls away from the sun and makes a very close approach to the Earth while sailing across the morning sky.
How about a helping hand? On New Year’s Eve, the 2-day-old crescent Moon will be just a few degrees from 45P. This simulation shows the view through 50mm or larger binoculars with an ~6 degree field of view for the Central time zone. Map: Bob King, Source: Stellarium
45P reaches perihelion or closest distance to the sun on Dec. 31 and will remain visible through about Jan. 15 at dusk. An approximately 2-week hiatus follows, when it’s lost in the twilight glow. Then in early February, the comet reappears at dawn and races across Aquila and Hercules, zipping closest to Earth on Feb. 11 at a distance of only 7.7 million miles. During that time, we may even be able to see this little fuzzball with the naked eye; its predicted magnitude of +6 at maximum is right at the naked eye limit. Even in suburban skies, it will make an easy catch in binoculars then.
I’ll update with new charts as we approach that time, plus you can check out this earlier post by fellow Universe Today writer David Dickinson. For now, enjoy the prospect of ‘opening up’ this cometary gift as the last glow of dusk subsides into night.
