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_* |
May 6 2006, 03:34 AM
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Guests |
I've often wondered about that, too. The only reason I can come up with is that they were unable to devise a technical solution in time for the failure of Zond 2 to unfold one of its two solar panels. Had Zond 3 been launched on time and worked, it would not only have stolen most of Mariner 4's thunder -- it would probably have prevented the Dec. 1965 decision to launch Mariners 6 and 7, at least as flybys. After all, not only would its photos have been higher quality than Mariner 4's, but it would have done some IR and UV spectrometry of Mars as well. (However, the US might then have decided to leapfrog ahead by launching Mariners 6 and 7 as orbiters in 1969, instead.) And what if some of Zond 3's photos had revealed the valley networks and runoff channels that early -- as the Mariner 6 and 7 photos, by remarkably bad luck, failed to do?
I have never been able to gloat about the Soviet planetary and lunar probe failures. Had their Mars probes succeeded -- even given their relatively primitive instrumentation and lack of biological experiments -- we would know much more about surface sites on Mars than we now do, and in fact the knowledge they provided would probably have allowed the US to speed up, and save money on, its own Mars exploration program. As for the 1963-65 Soviet attempts at survivable lunar landings: they would have given us much earlier information on the hardness of the lunar surface that would have been invaluable in designing the LM's landing gear, and might even have allowed us to trim back the expensive Surveyor program and/or focus it more on unmanned science studies of the Moon. |
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