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, 10:37 PM
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Guests |
I knew some (but not all) of what Ed Strick says about the partial foulup of Mariner 2's radiometry; thanks for the new details, Ed. I gather there was also some electronic "cross-talk" in its circuitry that had to be sorted out, with the result that the conclusions weren't announced until three months after the flyby. The conclusions turned out to be pretty accurate, though. (The National Geographic did an article at the time with a picture showing the locations on the Venusian disk of those 22 measurements the radiometers did make. Calling it a "crude" image is the understatement of the year.)
As for the Mars 3 failure, V.S. Perminov, in his history of the Mars program (with which he was intimately associated), doesn't mention an orbiter failure, and instead suggests that an electrostatic discharge from the powerful dust storm in which the lander touched down may have knocked it out. And a set of articles in "Spaceflight" from a St. Petersburg-located correspondent suggest that the failures of some earlier planetary craft were due to: (1) Immediate failure of a cooling unit on Venera 1, so that its electronics quickly overheated. (2) First-day loss of all of Mars 1's attitude-control nitrogen due to a leak. The Soviets knew on the first day that it couldn't make it to Mars, so they put it into a slow spin-stabilized roll to see how long they could maintain contact with it -- and thus briefly held the distance record for long-range radio communication. (3) Quick loss of the internal pressurization of Zond 1's electronics compartment, presumably leading to the electronics being knocked out by the resultant internal temperature extremes. |
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