Venus is the closest planet to Earth, and on the surface these two very different worlds seem to have a lot in common. Venus is about the same size as our planet, being only slightly smaller. Furthermore, like Earth, it is a relatively small rocky world that inhabits within the living room, where theoretically liquid water can exist. But Venus is much hotter than it should be, with a surface temperature reaching a hellish 900 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, it is hotter than Mercury, although Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun. However, in April 2013, astronomers announced that, almost 30 years ago, two Soviet balloon probes could have detected rain on Venus!
Until the 1960s, schoolchildren were incorrectly taught that Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is the twin sister of a planet on Earth. However, a closer examination of later generations of astronomers revealed that nothing could be further from the truth. Although Venus does, in fact, share certain commonalities with Earth, if it is Earth’s twin, it is certainly not identical, to say the least. Venus is a “strange sister” to the fiery, highly volcanic, and fiery Earth.
Venus resides from our Sun at a distance where its surface temperature should reach around 212 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the boiling point of water. However, radio measurements taken from Earth showed that Venus has literally the hottest surface of any planet in our Solar System. In fact, the temperature on its surface is high enough to melt the lead and give the rocks of Venus an eerie and creepy reddish glow.
Venus orbits our Sun in 224.7 days, compared to 365 for Earth. But it takes 243 days for Venus to rotate once on its axis, making a day on Venus longer than a year! Even stranger, Venus is spinning backward compared to the other seven major planets in our Sun’s lovely family of eight. When viewed from the top of the north pole, Venus would appear to be spinning clockwise. If it were possible for an Earthling to stand on the surface of this planet, the Sun would rise in the west, travel slowly across the sky, and then set in the east, the exact opposite of what happens on Earth. The surface pressure on Venus is comparable to 900 meters underwater.
Venus also does not possess Earth’s churning blue oceans of liquid water and its friendly, life-sustaining atmosphere. In fact, Venus is bone dry and unimaginably hot due to a runaway greenhouse effect that keeps this tortured planet imprisoned on its surface.
In fact, dripping drizzle possibly detected on Venus in the 1980s, by Soviet Union balloon probes. Vega 1 and 2, It was not a delicious light shower of liquid water that Earthlings love, but a “rain” horror composed of droplets of corrosive sulfuric acid.
The former Soviet Union joined several other European nations in 1984 to launch the Vega probes, a technologically challenging and sophisticated mission that launched a duo of balloons and landers onto the inhospitable surface of Venus. In fact, the Vega probes they represent the only time a mission has used balloons to explore another planet. The 3.5-meter-diameter balloon duo sailed for almost two Earth days in the strange atmosphere of Venus approximately 55 kilometers above its infernal surface. In stark contrast to the hostile landscape below, the atmosphere of Venus at this high altitude is enchanting. The temperature and pressure here are similar to the average for our own planet, and there is also enough sunlight to flow in from above and do its delicious incandescent dance.
Looks like rain
But Venus is not a lovely planet, at least not by our standards. The carbon dioxide that permeates the hellish atmosphere of this unfortunate planet is partially transparent at relatively short electromagnetic wavelengths.near infrared and visible radiation traveling to Venus from our star, the sun. This radiation is then absorbed by the rocks scattered across the surface of this planet, which then send the radiation out again, only this time, at longer wavelengths, called mid infrared gold thermal radiation. Carbon dioxide is considerably less transparent to thermal radiation, and as a result, a large amount of this radiation is simply sent back to this tortured planet. The radiation is first absorbed and then partially re-radiated by carbon dioxide back to the surface of Venus! This basically means that a great deal of energy remains trapped within the fiery envelope of Venus’s thick atmosphere. This is the way greenhouse effect it has damaged the potential of Venus to be a planet conducive to life, like ours. It’s also Earth’s way of keeping greenhouses cozy and comfortable.
But this tormented world is not comfortable. If ever there was a time, in the early days of our Solar System, when Venus sported beautiful blue seas and oceans of liquid water, the fugitive greenhouse effect it would inevitably have heated these ancestral bodies of life-friendly liquid to the merciless point that they evaporated and evaporated. Liquid water is necessary for life as we know it to exist. Liquid water makes it possible for certain chemical reactions to take place on our own planet. These reactions serve to capture unstable carbon and sulfur compounds and then imprison them in rocks. On waterless Venus, however, these volatile gases remain in the atmosphere and contribute to the leak. greenhouse effect.
The surface of Venus cannot be observed from Earth. This is because the infernal planet is shrouded in dense clouds that strongly reflect sunlight. However, space probes of Venus have shown that it has a surface marked by impact craters. Venus also has at least 1,600 major volcanoes, although they are smaller than those found on Earth. Venus has mountains, vast lava plains, and vast highlands. In addition to the fiery surface temperature of Venus and its crushingly heavy atmosphere, clouds of sulfuric acid fall into the dense atmosphere.
Venusian sulfuric acid clouds were long suspected of dropping raindrops of sulfuric acid onto the tortured, hellish planet. Possible observation signs of these corrosive raindrops were finally seen in the 30-year-old man. Vega data, and reported by scientists on April 6, 2013 Advances in space research. Most previous analyzes of the data from this mission suggest that the balloons slowly leaked their helium as they slowly descended through the clouds to the surface of Venus. However, aeronautical engineer Dr. Graham Dorrington, author of the April 6, 2013 article, noted, when examining the old Vega data, that one of the balloons of Vega 2 it had somehow reduced its leak rate. This was strange, because the balloon seemed to have repaired itself! “I found it funny,” commented Dr. Dorrington in the April 11, 2013 issue of Wired.com. Dr. Dorrington is from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.
Dr. Dorrington’s alternate explanation makes sense since balloons are not known to be self-healing. This alternate suggestion indicates that, as Vega The balloons floated deeper and deeper towards the cloud-darkened and blazingly hot surface of Venus, getting heavier and heavier …most likely due to the accumulation of liquid on its outer surface. According to this theory, the sulfuric acid could have come out of the corrosive clouds of Venus, spilling a fine mist that covered the globes and then finally dripped. The sensors of the Vega 2 The balloon showed that at one point the probe’s buoyancy changed rapidly, on the order of a mere minute, which could have happened when the balloon was thrown by a small, misty shower of sulfuric acid droplets.
Clouds are made up of very fine droplets of liquid that float in the atmosphere. When enough of these tiny droplets merge to create larger droplets, they then fall from the sky as rain. While tiny droplets could form in the sulfuric acid clouds that Venus sports, it is not yet known whether the largest true raindrops could be created in that environment. Dr. Kevin McGouldrick noted on April 11, 2013 Wired.com that “this work is credible and interesting, but speculative.” Dr. McGouldrick is at the University of Colorado at Boulder and was not involved in the study. From NASA Pioneer venus The spacecraft, which dropped a probe through Venus’ cloud layers in 1978, did not register large raindrops of sulfuric acid during its descent.
However, Dr. Dorrington points out that rain storms on Earth are only sporadic occurrences. The chances of a probe descending through Earth’s own atmosphere and hitting a storm aren’t exactly great. Therefore, Pioneer Venus, According to Dr. Dorrington, the acid rain from Venus may simply have been missed. Also, other spacecraft, such as Marinate 10, have seen signs of a possible Venusian rain, though not beyond a shadow of a doubt.
If Dr. Dorrington’s findings are finally corroborated with future space missions when they visit Venus, this would mean that the 30-year-old man Vega The data showed the first in situ observation of rain on another planet.