15 ms·
Momentum is building to explore Venus
- ValleyOfTheMtns 7y agoYachts on the methane oceans of Titan and dirigibles in the skies of Venus. I hope I live to see all this.
- tlb 7y agoThe enabling technology we need more of is electronics that can work at 500 C. People have demonstrated small-scale integrated circuits, but nothing like a microprocessor. https://science.nasa.gov/technology/technology-stories/electronics-demonstrate-operability-in-simulated-venus-conditions https://science.nasa.gov/technology/technology-stories/elect...
- cytherean 7y agoNot really - we don't have to land on the surface of Venus to explore it. https://www.space.com/29140-venus-airship-cloud-cities-incredible-technology.html https://www.space.com/29140-venus-airship-cloud-cities-incre...
- tlb 7y agoThe atmosphere is opaque, so you can't see much from high up. The most interesting science (to me) would be to look for fossils or other signs of life, for which you have to land and dig.
- labster 7y agoNot much evidence would be able to survive those temperatures and acidity levels. If you really want to dig through the molten earth, bring a titanium shovel.
- hsnewman 7y agoI've always wondered why we don't seed it with some biology that can eat the components of the Venusian atmosphere (ie: sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide) to make a more habitable planet over time.
- thebooktocome 7y agoBecause we've failed to terraform much closer, less inhospitable environments, and the risks for getting it wrong are very high.
- ForHackernews 7y agoWait, what are the risks? It's not like you're going to make Venus _more_ inhospitable than it already is. Worst case scenario is we'd lose some valuable scientific information about Venus in its natural state.
- darkpuma 7y agoThe risk that Venus is or was once host to some form of life, and humans deliberately contaminating Venus with life would obscure any evidence of it. That is a very serious worse-case scenario because non-earth life would be truly invaluable to biology. It seems like a remote risk to me, but not something to shrug off. Particularly since the usefulness of introducing life to Venus is itself quite remote.
- empath75 7y agoSo I had two thoughts while reading it: Is it possible that in the 3 billion years that it had liquid water, Venus evolved advanced life that managed to trigger runaway greenhouse warming? Secondly, is Venus’s atmosphere a worst case scenario for global warming here or is there something that would prevent it happening?
- albemuth 7y agothey would have just gone to Earth
- gnulinux 7y agoHow do you know? Can we go to Mars today? What if earth gets destroyed before we can emigrate to Mars? (assume that Mars is a clone of earth i.e. the same conditions we have in Earth) Also it's possible earth wasn't suitable for Venisian life back then.
- theseadroid 7y agoSay if we suddenly realize earth is going to be unsuitable for all life forms in a year. What would we do? I would fire as many rockets as possible to Mars, carrying all kind of life forms on earth, and hope a few of them will survive and possibly evolve to Mars' environment.
- jlarocco 7y agoThat's easy to say, but how would you actually do it? To use myself as a counterexample, I don't see the point, and wouldn't be inclined to help.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoEven all-out nuclear war would leave the Earth far more habitable than Mars. We'd need to come up with quite the feat to extinguish life here, think steering a Moon-sized asteroid.
- 7y ago
- daggerhashimoto 7y agoI don't believe any of this shit.
- nickserv 7y agoI wonder why there isn't a balloon mission being studied. The upper atmosphere has temperature and pressure similar to Earth at sea level. Maybe the wind is a big problem? Or insertion from orbit?
- Frenchgeek 7y agoBecause then conspiracy theorists will understand a weather ballon can be an alien spacecraft too.
- CodiePetersen 7y agoI think upper atmosphere study would be great. There are some colony designs that suggest an oxygen filled colony would float at earth pressure. And with the sulfuric acid and co2 you have everything you need to make water air and fuel. Not to mention protection from asteroids and deadly rays. It would be a challenge but all of the planets and other bodies present their own challenges.
- sandworm101 7y agoAt the same ambient pressure, an O2 would float, but just barely. It wouldn't float like a hydrogen/helium balloon does on earth. If the pressure is the same on either side of the balloon, lift comes from different atomic weights of the gasses. Helium weights much less than air. But the O2 inside the Venus habitat doesn't weigh all that much less than the CO2 outside. As a practical matter, you would probably need lift balloons filled with something other than breathable air/O2. [1] Then think about what you want to do in this habitat. A solar/nuke-powered refinery for producing rocket fuel? It would need lift bags the size of cities. Not the Goodyear blimp. Think bags filled with cubic kilometers of lifting gas. [1] This is why balloons wouldn't work on Jupiter/Saturn etc. No balloon can float in a sea of hydrogen. We would need a 'balloon' filled with vacuum, or at least hydrogen under vacuum pressure in comparison to the hydrogen outside. Soft-sided bags wouldn't work.
- 7952 7y agoI wonder if you could synthesise a carbon based material directly from CO2 in the atmosphere and use that to build the gas/vacuum holders.
- Isamu 7y agoStay tuned for the Venus mechanical maker challenge: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/events/2019/3/1/mechanical-maker-challenge-to-be-announced/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/events/2019/3/1/mechanical-make... >With its sulfuric acid clouds, temperatures over 450°C, and 92 times the surface pressure of Earth, Venus is one of the most hostile planetary environments in the solar system. Prior missions have only survived hours! But an automaton (or clockwork mechanical robot) could solve this problem. By utilizing high-temperature alloys, the clockwork rover would survive for months, allowing it to collect and return valuable long-term science data from the surface of Venus. >Challenge to be announced on July 8, 2019 Question: does NASA have a Venus environmental chamber? They must, right? How big is it?
- _Microft 7y agoThis is great, I didn't know they were following up on this concept. I had read an article [0] from 2017 before but wasn't aware of any further developments. [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/space-robots/jpl-design-for-a-clockwork-rover-to-explore-venus https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/space-robots/jp...
- Robotbeat 7y agoYes. NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio has one, I believe. They were building it when I was an intern ~6 years ago. Of course, Glenn also has high temperature electronics. Memory is hard to come by, but simple analog and digital circuits are feasible (enough for data digitization, multiplexing, some forward error correction, and transmission to orbital assets). Here are a couple papers on the idea of all-high-temperature-electronics designs (which I think are a lot more realistic and effective than a mechanical automaton, as fun as that sounds) for a long duration lander design (can be adapted to a rover, etc, as well) related to the work I did: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140017762.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201400... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576515000594 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457651...
- scottlocklin 7y ago
- SaberTail 7y agoI'm glad Venus is getting more attention. Mars seems to get the most attention as a place to visit, but we seem to ignore Venus. Venus has a few things going for it that I think make it a better choice for permanent human habitation than Mars. * Venus has nearly Earth-like gravity (8.9 m/s² instead of 9.8 m/s²) * The atmosphere 50 km above the surface is the right temperature for liquid water, and has a similar atmospheric pressure to Earth at sea level. [1] * Venus has suffered a runaway greenhouse effect. It's a good place to experiment on how to mitigate or reverse that without risking Earth. And what we do learn may be applicable to Earth in the not-too-distant future. [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030022668.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/200300...
- modzu 7y agowell you said it: we know exactly how to heat up mars (greenhouse gases) but its not so clear how to cool down venus. also mars has water.
- hathawsh 7y agoWe don't need to cool it down. We could float a platform about 49.5 km above the surface of Venus, where the temperature and pressure nearly match the earth at sea level. To launch a probe, we could simply drop it from the platform. This article about Venus is very enlightening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
- turtlecloud 7y agoWhat if your float thing pops? Everyone sinks and dies??
- crispyporkbites 7y agoWe don't need to cool Venus down, but in a few hundred years we might need to cool the earth, so learning how to do that on Venus might be a good idea.
- 7y ago
- eloff 7y agoWhy couldn't you vacuum insulate the electronics and place some kind of radiative cooling on top of them? You'd need the cooler to be able to radiate all the radiative energy coming into the chamber from outside it, plus what the electronics generate. You'd want the thermos type chamber to be reflective to radiation from one side only. It would depend on how low energy you can get the electronics, plus how efficient your black body cooler is. I have no idea if the latter could be done practically. Might be a lot easier than high temperature electronics or mechanical alternatives.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoPretty sure a completely passive cooling system able to maintain its inside cooler than its outside would violate thermodynamics somehow. I'm not a physicist though.
- dflock 7y ago> Why couldn't you vacuum insulate the electronics and place some kind of radiative cooling on top of them? Radiative cooling only works if you have a hot source and a relatively cooler sink - on Earth, usually the atmosphere. On Venus the atmosphere is ~462 °C at the surface, so it's going to be much hotter than your electronics - so your sink will be hotter than your source, so the "raditaive cooling" will run in reverse. Also, the atmospheric pressure on Venus is very high - 92 atmospheres at the surface - the equivalent of being 1km underwater on Earth. Maintaining a vacuum chamber with this much outside pressure (not to mention temperature) would be an incredible feat of materials engineering - and would probably by extremely heavy. You would also still need sensors and communications outside your vacuum chamber, otherwise your expensive probe can't actually do anything useful.
- curtis 7y agoBecause of Venus's think atmosphere, landing a probe or rover is really easy. The downside, also because of Venus's thick atmosphere, is that the surface is really, really hot. That limits the lifetime of hardware on the surface. I think it ought to be possible to design a probe that's more like a submersible than a rover. Technically it would be an airship rather than a submarine, but given Venus's thick atmosphere it could be quite heavy and robust. This vehicle could bounce between the surface (for science) and the upper atmosphere (for recharging). In the upper atmosphere the probe could make more coolant from the atmosphere using solar power, and then it could make another dive to the surface.
- ahje 7y agoAn airship seems like the most survivable option for longer missions. I wonder if it would be possible to use one as a carrier for smaller drone-ships. Wind speeds on Venus are quite low, but the force is probably quite insane considering the atmospheric pressure.
- m4rtink 7y agoFor the record the soviet Vega probes deployed a couple baloons and they worked just fine for quite a while.
- taf2 7y agoI think this from 2014 looks really cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcHkWKp9e4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcHkWKp9e4Y
- api 7y agoI really wonder if we'd be likely to find fossils underground there. Of course landing long enough without melting to find them would be hard.
- wainstead 7y agoThe Soviets succeeded in returning surface images from a number of their landers, and the photos are quite tantalizing. http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm "Venus Revealed" is a pretty good read: https://www.amazon.com/Venus-Revealed-Clouds-Mysteriious-Planet/dp/0201406551/ref=sr_1_4 https://www.amazon.com/Venus-Revealed-Clouds-Mysteriious-Pla...
- ndiscussion 7y agovery cool, thanks for sharing
- gnl 7y agoSlightly off-topic, but no argument for colonising Venus could possibly be complete without digging this gem of a comment out of the archives about cooking a turkey there: http://www.transterrestrial.com/2013/12/09/venerian-gas-phase-processes/#comment-323482 http://www.transterrestrial.com/2013/12/09/venerian-gas-phas...
- dekhn 7y agoReading about the Soviet Union's systematic process to finally get some decent data from a lander was very impressive.
- fouc 7y agoHas anyone considered colonizing asteroids? If you can spin the asteroids you can generate enough centripetal force to mimic gravity. Not sure what the chances of asteroids being solid enough to be spun without flying apart though. Another option would be to build a track around the asteroid and move a colony along that track. Need about 1 kilometer of radius from center and 1 rotation per minute to generate 1 g force. Interesting.. gravity train: https://i.imgur.com/Q2D5i1K.png https://i.imgur.com/Q2D5i1K.png
- artur_makly 7y ago“But momentum is building to explore Venus, in part because scientists say it could hold the secret to understanding what makes a planet habitable. Once Earth’s twin, today Venus is a hellish abode where surface temperatures reach more than 400 °C, atmospheric pressures slam down with enough force to crush heavy machinery and clouds of sulfuric acid blow through the sky. If researchers could decipher why conditions on Venus turned so deadly, that would help them to assess whether life might exist on some of the thousand-plus rocky worlds that astronomers are discovering throughout the Galaxy.”. life exists here. let’s stop looking for exit strategies and stop wasting valuable time and money on far away rocks. we need to put all that time and energy dreaming and solving for a better EARTH.
- steve_taylor 7y agoThere’s no reason 7.7 billion people can’t collectively do more than one thing at the same time.