Venus Balloon Probe to Visit Chemically Violent World
VALOR has distinct advantages over its predecessors. The key to VALOR’s success will be longevity — the mission calls for a thirty-day cruise. To that end, the system must be robust, explains Kerzhanovich:
The whole idea is to make it impermeable so it will not lose the gas in a month and maybe forever. It will be built of very strong material, the same material that MER (Mars Exploration Rover) air bags were made of. And remember on Mars when you dropped this 400 kilos of MER experiments with the speed of about 20 meters per second they didn’t pop.
VALOR carries six times the payload of earlier balloons, and will return 100 times the data in a mission lasting 15 times as long.
JPL’s Kevin Baines believes the next generation of science for Venus must come from within its environment:
You have to do what I call “experiencing Venus” to get all the answers. We try to do chemistry from orbit, and we do, but it’s all model-dependent on knowing the clouds. For example, if you have a high cloud with so many molecules of sulfuric acid, you assume that the cloud itself is made of it. But inside the cloud itself, you can get light rattling around and different things going on. When you try to derive the abundances of things, it can really be mucked up by the clouds. It also depends on lighting conditions, time of day. It’s much better to be in situ where you can float around and actually measure and count up the molecules accurately and not have to worry about modeling.
Venus is a chemically violent world with many different reactions going on compared to the Earth’s atmosphere. Baines calls it “a laboratory for understanding all sorts of chemical atmospheric processes”:
We really want to watch these chemical cycles going on in the atmosphere. It’s very much temperature and pressure dependent as well, so as the balloon bobs up and down just a couple kilometers, we expect the sulfur dioxide, for example, to change by almost a factor of ten. We can use that information together with other chemical species to find out what the most important cycles on Venus are.
Baines agrees with Kerzhanovich that the mission is one of potentially great discovery:
It’s like sailing the seas for the first time. I feel like Magellan. I don’t know what’s going to be on the other side.
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.