Venus Science |
Venus Science |
Feb 10 2006, 10:18 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
Sunspot, NM (Feb. 7, 2006) -- The planet Venus is best known for the thick layers of clouds that veil its surface from view by telescopes on Earth. But the veil has holes, and a New Mexico State University scientist plans on using a solar telescope to peer through them to study the weather on Venus.
"Observations of Venus from a nighttime telescope at a single location are very difficult because Venus is so close to the Sun in the sky," said Dr. Nancy Chanover, a planetary scientist at NMSU in Las Cruces, NM. "You can observe it for about two hours at most." Then the Sun rises and blinds the telescope (or Venus sets, depending on the time of year). http://www.nso.edu/press/venus06/ -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Feb 13 2006, 09:16 AM
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Guests |
Regarding Mariner 5, Jane's Solar System Log by Andrew Wilson (1987) stated that the flyby Venus probe was considered for carrying a small landing capsule, but the idea was rejected. Any idea what this Mariner 5 Venus lander would have looked like? What instruments it could have carried? Could they have developed it in time? Would it have been more or less advanced than the early Venera landers of 1966-1972? Any drawings of it available? Did they expect it to survive to the surface, or just hope to get atmospheric readings before being crushed? That I can firmly answer: it would have made temperature and pressure measurements all the way to the surface before crashing -- period -- and, had it been flown, it would have forced elimination of all other science experiments on the mission. NASA nevertheless did briefly but seriously consider it before quickly deciding that it could not be developed in time. One additional note: until the Soviets pulled off the Venera 4 landing, NASA was leaning toward flying a single April 1972 Mariner Venus mission that would have flown by and released an entry probe, which would have carried a mass spectrometer and some of the other basic weather sensors. The flyby craft had a number of alternative instruments considered for it, including a camera and a high-resolution microwave radiometer to do some altitude mapping of the surface (although, oddly, radar altimetry doesn't seem to have been considered in the preliminary design). After Venera 4, this mission was dumped as too redundant -- although, even given a mass spectrometer cruder and less sensitive than the one on Pioneer 13, it seems to me that it would have gotten a lot of important new data. Maybe the assumption was that, by then, the Soviets would already have flown an entry probe with a mass spec. If so, NASA overestimated them. |
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