Venus Balloon Probe to Visit Chemically Violent World
Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, Venus, is similar to our world in size, but its environment it truly alien. The weather on Venus is ruled not by water, but by battery acid. Venus seems endowed with more than its share of sulfur, and that sulfur combines with other elements to form complex things like sulfuric acid hazes. Acid rain is a real issue on Venus.
What can we learn from our cosmic neighbor, and how can it help us better care for our own world?
For the answer to this and other questions, researchers like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Viktor Kerzanovich have been working to send an ambitious balloon mission to the hothouse world. The probe is called VALOR, for Venus Atmospheric Long-duration Observatory for in-situ Research.
In interviews conducted by the author with several project scientists for a forthcoming book, Kerzanovich said:
We have been working for several years to fly a new type of balloon on Venus that will last for about 30 days, so we hope that this will be a very spectacular and very science-rich project. VALOR is a big balloon that can carry about 400 kilos above the Venus surface.
VALOR would be the third balloon to visit the skies of Venus. In 1985, two comet-bound Soviet probes dropped off landers at Venus, each carrying an “aerostat” balloon probe designed by Soviet and French engineers. As the landers descended, they released their helium-filled balloons some 33 miles above the ground. The altitude was important, says balloon designer Jacques Blamont:
Venus ballooning is very easy above 50 kilometers [31 miles] altitude. It is more cool up there. At lower levels, it is still possible, but has not been done.
Each Teflon balloon spanned 11½ feet in diameter and carried a battery-powered instrument gondola to observe pressure, temperature, light levels, windspeeds, and mist density. The missions lasted until their batteries gave out, nearly 48 hours into each flight.
I can already picture what the cameras will undoubtedly reveal – the rusted out hulks of billions of SUVs.
I hope they did an environmental impact study.
Venus is about our size but has 80 times more gases. It’s one hell of a challenge for space probes. I hope the balloons work.
I honestly fail to see the relevance of Venus in assessing our environmental challenges. Venus is in a state the earth was about 3 billion years ago and is just not comparable. This is just more left-wing agenda.
>Venus is in a state the earth was about 3 billion years ago
Wrong- for whatever reason, Venus has no plate tectonics or magnetic field. It would be interesting to know why. It might be more correct to say that venus is what earth will be like in 3B years.
As soon as this experiment proves successful, Obama will put a “balloon ban” on Venus and declare it off limits to exploration due to it’s being so “environmentally sensitive”.
The the EPA will immediately issue a new mandate that the United States must begin to pay a “sulphur tax” for the man made Venusian Warming giving Al Gore another scam for “sulphur credits” that must be paid to him for any future space exploration.
NASA will be too busy to care, being given the monumental task of making sane people think radical Islam is nothing more than Boy Scouts with a misguided agenda….
I hope this works…I hope they continue…and I hope that Washington and NASAria stay the hell out of it. Science, when done correctly, is fascinating.
There is no relevance. It’s just Chicago politics. If I am paying for this boondoggle (with tax payer money of course) I am damn well going to get something for it. And no matter how tenuous a connection, they will find some way to opportunistically promote their ideology. In this case probably to manipulate the gullible and to promote the AGW scam. I can see the headline: Dateline Venus: Greenhouse Gases Raise Surface Temperature to 900 Degrees Fahrenheit. Earth next!
Same explanation for why NASA executives have been charged with making Islam feel better about its medieval mathematics.
The growing season in Fairbanks now stands at 120 days, 50 percent longer in 2007 than it was in 1905. Naw, global warming is a hoax!
I think the planet has been warming, but the “human caused” part of it is a hoax. (“But human pollution has to have an effect”? Ever hear of Chaos Theory, hurricanes, and butterfly wings? I’m not impressed.)
Something that has long puzzled me is why Hanson and his HadCRU buddies have had to tell lies, alter data, use biased computer models, and generally trash the scientific method? Local temperatures (Alaska) have long been warming.
Crusader is way off the mark. The spin of Venus is retrograde meaning a single day is longer than a the year on Venus. Just over 243 earth days according to the 83rd CRC Hdbk of Chemistry and Physics.
How habitable would Texas be if every day was 243 days and noon to 1:00 lasted ten days. Add that the rock show no signs so far of captured water and we should start selling exportation leased. Fifty year leases to the highest bidder to do anything useful with the planet they can imagine. In the far future we might smack it with a comer from the Oort cloud to give it water and a respectable spin. In addition an impact event could be arranged to give Venus a moon and strip off the bulk of the atmosphere. If Venus had a moon it would stabilize. The calculations from the earth’s moon impact indicate that a century is all it would take.
Interesting take on things Avitar. I love the idea of terraforming as a thought experiment and hopefully one day a reality. The problem is according to a couple documentaries I’ve watched and a book or two I’ve read, the birthing planetary body for the moon was a rogue planet approximately the size of Mars. The sheer mass of the striking slowed Earth’s rotation from a 10 hour day (if i recall correctly), tilted our axis to give us regualr warming and cooling periods and what sheered of the striking body again coalesced into the moon we know today. Unless we find a lone Kryptonian in Kansas or Joe Biden turns out to have been born and raised in the Q contimium, I don’t see us every having the where-with-all to move a planet.
To get the same effects with a comet, we’d frankly have to send so many inbound that I could see Obama bowing and apologizing to Venus for America’s use of ABMD or Astronimcal Bodies of Mass Destruction.