New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades - The New York Times - 0 views
-
NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.
-
Venus is in many ways a twin of Earth — it is comparable in size, mass and composition, and it is the planet whose orbit is the closest to Earth’s. But the history of the two planets diverged. While Earth is moderate in temperature and largely covered with water, Venus, with a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide, is a hellishly hot 900 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface. After numerous missions by the United States and the Soviet Union to explore it in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, attention shifted elsewhere.
-
They said they had detected a molecule, phosphine, for which they could come up with no plausible explanation for how it might have formed there except as the waste product of living organisms.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
Concentrations of krypton, argon, neon and xenon — the noble gases that do not react with other elements — may provide hints about how Venus and its atmosphere formed. The measurements might also find signs of whether water has escaped from Venus into space and whether oceans ever covered the surface.
-
The new mission will be able to provide topographic measurements that are more than 100 times better than what Magellan produced, stitched together into a highly detailed three-dimensional map.