Venus Express launched

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RedFox

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On Thursday, the European Space Agency launched Venus Express. The design was adapted from that of Mars Express, so it was developed quickly and cheaply. It'll reach Venus in April 2006 and study its atmosphere. This would help to generalize our knowledge of how planetary atmospheres work. Along with knowledge of Mars and Titan's atmospheres, it'll allow better models for atmospheres to be made. Then it could tell us about how Earth's climate could change. After all, Venus has a big greenhouse effect from all of that carbon dioxide it has. At least we have water on Earth that had dissolved lots of carbon dioxide, allowing it to locked up in limestone instead of roasting us. They think that maybe Venus was more earthlike long ago, but lost water because of being closer to the sun, so it couldn't lock away carbon dioxide into limestone. Or it never had enough water to do it. Venus Express should reveal more about Venus and improve understanding of those planetary mechanisms.

Universe Today
 
This is interesting article. I hope that they will find and compare something new that would prevent happen to our Earth. i.e. gas greenhouse. I would imagine that our glaciers are melt completely that would turn into a 2nd sister of Venus.
 
Miss*Pinocchio said:
I think Venus is just a big rock just like the Moon.
Click to expand...

Sure, it is a big ball of rock. So is the Earth. What makes them different from the Moon? They have enough mass to have significant atmospheres. The Earth's atmosphere keep us alive and the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus would crush and fry us with a pressure of 90 times that of Earth's and tempertures of over 900F in the equatorial lowlands. There are also sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid clouds. :ugh:
The Moon's atmosphere is at a puny 3x10^-15 atmospheres in pressure, three quadrillionths of the Earth's pressure. It's from outgassing and temperory capturning of solar wind particles by the Moon.
The last time the Moon had lava was billions of years ago as measured by looking at how the lava fields got cratered, calibrated by radiometric dating of rocks collected from some of these sites. Applying that crater metric to date Venus' surface, taking in account of how the thick atmosphere limits the size of meteors that can make it to the surface, suggests a maximum age of 800 million years for Venus's surface and an average of about 650 million years. So it had been getting resurfaced by basaltic lava, creating the basalt fields we've seen there. They think there may still be activity in some places. They found no evidence of plate tectonics there, so they think that the heat builds up inside Venus and gets out once every several hundred million years or so by melting the entire surface. :Ohno:
Missions like Venus Express might be able to tell us something about that. During the Galileo probe's Venus flyby on its way to Jupiter, they found a wavelength that Venus's atmosphere could be transparent in. So they set up Venus Express to be able to look at Venus at that wavelength, possiblity allowing it to see the surface of Venus. :eek2: I wonder how that will compare to the radar maps we already have.

Some images of Venus' surface These show plenty of rocks. :D

And Wikipedia sure is a gold mine of stuff to read about. :dizzy:
 
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