Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is an extreme place - hot and dry with surface pressures over 90 times higher than the Earth's and a super thick atmosphere mainly composed of carbon dioxide.
Because the surface is hidden by sulphuric acid clouds, and the planet is similar to the Earth in size, astronomers speculated for many years that Venus might be a lush world full of life.
It is now thought possible that the Sun's heat boiled away early oceans on the planet triggering a planet-warming runaway greenhouse effect that turned Venus into a hellish place.
Photo: A false-colour view of Venus taken by the Galileo probe. This photo was coloured blue to show details in Venus's clouds. (NASA/JPL)
Prior to Mariner 2's 1962 flyby of Venus, some scientists such as Dr Carl Sagan thought that conditions on the planet might favour life. However, the probe's instruments showed that the cloudy planet's surface was extremely hot, greatly reducing the chance that anything could survive there.
The Russian Venus probe Venera 4 arrived at the planet in October 1967. As it entered the thick Venusian atmosphere, unexpectedly high pressures destroyed the craft as it descended. However, the probe managed return data to the Earth.
Can the Russians design a spacecraft capable of surviving Venus's extreme pressures?
The Russians took on the challenge of building a probe strong enough to survive the incredibly high atmospheric pressures on Venus. Ultimately they succeeded with Venera 7 in 1970. The subsequent Venera 9 mission returned photographs of the planet's volcanic surface.
Researchers believe that in the early days of the Solar System, Earth, Venus and Mars had similar atmospheres, but they developed very differently. Mars couldn't hold onto its atmosphere, while a runaway greenhouse effect may have boiled away oceans on Venus. Earth, on the other hand, benefited from its greenhouse effect.
The orbiting probe maps the planet's surface with radar and finds many strange sights.
After arriving at the planet in 1989, the Magellan probe orbited Venus many times and used its radar to map the cloud-covered surface. The data revealed a surface with numerous volcanoes and geological features unlike any seen on the Earth.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows. Because Venus is an inferior planet from Earth, it never appears to venture far from the Sun: its elongation reaches a maximum of 47.8°. Venus reaches its maximum brightness shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset, for which reason it has been known as the Morning Star or Evening Star.
Venus is classified as a terrestrial planet and it is sometimes called Earth's "sister planet" owing to their similar size, gravity, and bulk composition. Venus is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid, preventing its surface from being seen from space in visible light. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all the terrestrial planets in the Solar System, consisting of mostly carbon dioxide. The atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface is 92 times that of the Earth. Venus has no carbon cycle to lock carbon back into rocks and surface features, nor does it seem to have any organic life to absorb it in biomass. Venus is believed to have previously possessed oceans, but these evaporated as the temperature rose owing to the runaway greenhouse effect. The water has most probably photodissociated, and, because of the lack of a planetary magnetic field, the free hydrogen has been swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind. Venus's surface is a dry desertscape with many slab-like rocks, periodically refreshed by volcanism.
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