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Venus is the second planet to orbit our Sun in the Solar System. Circling at an average distance of about 108 million kilometers (about 67 million miles) from the Sun, it lies between the orbits of Mercury and Earth.
While it takes our planet just under 24 hours to make a full 360-degree rotation, it takes Venus a little over 243 Earth days to do the same. In that time it has already traveled completely around the Sun once, a journey that takes only 225 Earth days.
If we define a day by the amount of time between two sunrises, this slow travel means that a Venus day lasts almost 117 days.
Stranger still, the direction of its rotation is opposite to that of most planets, including ours. Exactly why is a mystery. One possibility is that the Sun’s tidal forces pulled Venus in the right way so that it slowly slowed down and reversed its spin.
What would it be like to stand on the surface of Venus?
Venus’s atmosphere is dominated by a heavy layer made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide, with a couple percent nitrogen and a few other trace gases.
It is so thick that, standing on its surface, you would experience a pressure similar to diving almost 800 meters deep (about 2,550 feet) into Earth’s water.
The generous amount of carbon dioxide also traps a significant amount of incoming heat from the Sun, pushing temperatures in excess of 460 degrees Celsius (860 Fahrenheit).
At an altitude of about 60 to 80 kilometers (40 to 50 miles), a thick blanket of clouds looms. Although its complete structure is not clearly understood, the upper section is believed to be a sulfuric acid mist. In the atmosphere of Venus, sunlight also breaks down carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide above the clouds.
In 2020, astronomers discovered a significant abundance of chemical phosphine high up in Venus’s atmosphere. On Earth, this chemical is produced through geological and biological processes, but it is unknown whether it comes from an organic or biological process.
Structurally speaking, the surface of Venus resembles our own planet in several ways. It is a terrestrial (rocky) planet made of silicates and metals, with a radius of 6,052 kilometers (3,760 miles), only a few hundred kilometers less than Earth, and a similar density that gives it a gravity of about 90 percent of our own world.
Venus under its clouds (NASA)
The geology of the planet is also strongly structured by its history of volcanic activity, but with marked differences that do not seem to resemble anything found here. Formations that resemble vast spider webs (called arachnoids) spread across the landscape in some areas.
Some of these unusual features could be boiled down to another key difference between our two worlds. Unlike Earth, Venus does not have plate tectonics. Without plate boundaries, its geological activity is concentrated differently than ours.
While Venus still appears to be volcanically active and is believed to have a considerable iron core, any dynamo effects produced by streams of molten mineral deep within its crust do not appear to be powerful enough to give Venus a magnetic field. self-generated.
Why the Earth has a magnetic field, while Venus does not, is another curiosity to be solved. One possibility is the collision that a moon gave us, something that Venus lacks, stirred the bowels of our planet in a way that has left us with a swirl of magnetizing currents.
Could we ever travel to Venus?
While Mars has attracted significant attention in the past, space exploration has had its fair share of missions to our other neighbor.
Orbiting Venus is one thing. Getting a probe to land on the surface and survive long enough to send out a few digital postcards is a challenge fraught with extreme heat, pressure, and corrosive elements.
In 1967, the Soviet Venera 4 probe not only became the first mission to survive a fall in the clouds of Venus, it was the first technology to directly analyze the atmosphere of another world.
Future missions to Venus would have to overcome similar hurdles, potentially depending on more robust technology (or even a watch). The risks might well be worth it to unravel the many remaining mysteries of one of our closest heavenly neighbors.
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