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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Apr 10 2006, 03:48 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
"VENUS' CLIMATE IS TELLING US THAT WE REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND THE EARTH"
The Observer, 9 April 2006 Venus: the hot spot This week a European spacecraft will arrive for a date with Venus, our closest planetary neighbour. Scientists hope the mission, made on a shoestring budget, will reveal vital lessons on how unchecked greenhouse gases can turn a world into a blistering Hades. Robin McKie reports on a journey to the Forgotten Planet On Tuesday morning, mission controllers in the European Space Agency's operations centre in Darmstadt will put the finishing touches to an international bid to study the ultimate neighbour from hell. They will transmit a series of radio commands to a robot spacecraft currently hurtling towards the Sun. Its rocket engine will fire for 50 minutes as it passes Venus, slowing the craft down so that it can be captured by the planet's gravitational field. Once in orbit, the wardrobe-sized probe - Venus Express - will then study the planet's acid clouds, searing heat, crushingly dense atmosphere and hurricanes to find out why Earth's nearest neighbour has become a place of insufferable heat and poison. 'Venus is very like Earth in that it is the same size and has an orbit round the Sun close to ours,' said David Southwood, head of science at the ESA. 'Yet Venus went wrong. We did not. We want to find out why Venus became our evil twin.' Venus and Earth are almost identical in size. In addition, both orbit the Sun in 'the Goldilocks zone', a swath of space in which conditions are considered by astronomers as being not too hot and not too cold to prevent the evolution of life. Venus should make ideal planetary real estate, in other words. Yet it is the solar system's most inhospitable planet. 'It's very disturbing that we do not understand the climate on a planet that is so much like the Earth,' said Professor Fred Taylor, a planetary scientist based at Oxford University and one of the ESA's chief advisers for the Venus Express mission. 'It is telling us that we really don't understand the Earth. We have ended up with a lot of mysteries.' Full article here: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...1750001,00.html -------------------- "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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