Venus is so tantalizingly near being a twin of Earth. Its measurement, composition, and density are so much like the properties of our homeworld… however in the case of habitability, Venus could not be extra totally different.
Wrapped in a dense, choking shroud of poisonous, acidic clouds, the floor of Venus is hostile, and never simply to life.
Because of a runaway greenhouse effect, through which these clouds entice the warmth of the Solar and forestall it escaping again into house, Venus’ average surface temperature sits at a horrifying 464 levels Celsius (867 levels Fahrenheit). To not point out the atmospheric strain – nearly 100 times that of Earth’s.
Scientists have struggled to plot a lander that might survive these deeply inhospitable circumstances… however, imagine it or not, we do even have information from the Venusian floor. Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet house program despatched a sequence of 16 probes to Earth’s sunside neighbor.
This system was known as Venera, and it was, in no unsure phrases, a triumph. It was the primary program to efficiently enter the environment of one other planet, with Venera 3 in 1966. In 1970, Venera 7 was the primary probe to make a comfortable touchdown on one other planet.
And, though not one of the eight Venera probes that landed on Venus lasted greater than two hours – the longest was Venera 12, which lasted 110 minutes earlier than succumbing to the warmth and strain – Venera was the primary mission to ship to Earth photos and sounds from one other planet.
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To date, Venera is the only program to have sent images and audio from the surface of Venus. Venera 13 and 14 recorded sound, and Venera 9, 10, 13, and 14 took panoramic images of their landing sites.
The data that came in is, by today’s standards, perhaps a bit grainy, but it was decades ago, and the conditions under which the probes operated were very stressful. Below, the first images, from Venera 9 and 10 can be seen, taken in 1975, and Venera 13, in 1982.
You can see a significant difference in image quality between the two timeframes, even though they were separated by just a few years.
In more recent times, others have revisited the nearly 50-year-old data with the improved image processing technology and techniques available to us, resulting in some pretty interesting pictures of Venus.
They show a golden-hued, alien world, one that somehow just looks forbidding, even without a hint of the temperature, pressure, or poison that would devastate life as we know it.
Today in 1982, Venera 14 imaged the surface of Venus. It would be, to date, the final time. While Vegas 1 and 2 would deliver landers and balloons to Venus in 1985, they would not image the surface. And since then, there have been no landers. pic.twitter.com/7rnac0Z7Qi
— Ted Stryk (@tedstryk) March 5, 2021
That golden hue is a result of sunlight filtering through the Venusian clouds, tinting the surface. Image processing performed at Brown University reveals that the rocks and dirt on the planet’s surface have a dark grayish hue.
This is thought to be because of the way that surface formed: Venus’s surface is dominated by volcanic options – in actual fact, it may still be volcanically active today – and the darkish rock is regarded as basaltic.
Because of the ways in which Venus is similar to Earth, scientists are keen to learn more about it. Studying Venus could help us learn some of the ways in which planets’ evolutionary paths can deviate, to produce an environment that is conducive to life, or one that is very extremely not.
This is information that we can use to search for life elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, and answer some of humanity’s most fundamental questions: how did we get here, and why?
Although our technology has improved since the days of Venera, we’re yet to send another probe to Venus. Several upcoming missions from space agencies around the globe plan to study the planet’s atmosphere. Roscosmos is the only agency with current plans to ship a lander to the floor.
So for now, we’re simply sort of caught in Venus limbo – watching decades-old photos, questioning what secrets and techniques cover inside that unusual, alien panorama.
