Venus Express Survives Daring Atmospheric Dive

YES! She survived her "aero-surfing" on Venus' upper atmosphere. IMO, the best snippet from the article is:

During its descent Venus Express measured a thousandfold increase in atmospheric density from 160 down to 130 km (100 to 80 miles) in altitude, as well as solar panel heating of over 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). Additional fluctuations in velocity were measured between the planet’s day and night side.

Link to Article at Discovery News

So, in 30Km, the atmosphere increased 1000 fold in density! Just, WOW. Also interesting is the measurable difference between the light and dark sides, This will definitely help planning future missions, and hopefully allow them to better adjust for the difference in density, or target EDL to not cross the terminator.

What I think is great, is the recent decisions by both NASA and ESA to try risky things/maneuvers at the end of the lives of these remote probes. It's good to know that something new will be learned even in the throws of their destruction.

Very cool.

a reply to: Krakatoa

Nice..

I would like to see a ground surveyor sent to Venus to poke around.. The last time a lander made it to the surface and sent images back was by the Soviet Union.

a reply to: Xcathdra

Barren.

originally posted by: Luuke123
a reply to: Xcathdra

Barren.

From some of the orbital probes its been discovered Venus does have continents as well as "oceans", albeit not water. Barren or not is some place other than Earth. To me that merits attention and exploration.

who knows, maybe we will find elements on Venus / other solar system planets that does not occur on earth, unlocking the holy grail that would allow us to travel more efficiently in our solar system and hopefully beyond it.

There is a problem with that. the periodic table has very few places to hide new forms of elements. That said it is possible that there are forms of matter that are not baryonic in nature. there there would be second and possibly third periodic tables of baryonic analog. for instance if monopoles were substituted for regular protons and neutrons then even though you would have analogs to baryonic elements those analogs would have astonishing properties. E;G monopole steel would be millions of times stronger than steel and would not melt even if plunged into the sun.

In addition familiar old baryonic matter may have exotic existance modes such as mirror matter which would be completely invisible because regular photons would not interact except by inelastic collisions and gravity.

it is of course possible that certain astronomical circumstances could synthesize trans uranic elements that are stable. for example a supergiant binary with a pulsar or neutron star hidden in ti is proposed to be able to do this. regular novae and super novae cannot reach the energy needed.

originally posted by: Xcathdra

originally posted by: Luuke123
a reply to: Xcathdra

Barren.

From some of the orbital probes its been discovered Venus does have continents as well as "oceans", albeit not water. Barren or not is some place other than Earth. To me that merits attention and exploration.

who knows, maybe we will find elements on Venus / other solar system planets that does not occur on earth, unlocking the holy grail that would allow us to travel more efficiently in our solar system and hopefully beyond it.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

I was under the impression the period table could exceed over 200 elements, with plateaus of stable elements around some of the higher elements.

originally posted by: Xcathdra
a reply to: stormbringer1701

I was under the impression the period table could exceed over 200 elements, with plateaus of stable elements around some of the higher elements.

that is possible. but outside of ufo lore there is very little to suggest stable transuranic elements would have unusual world altering properties. However; recently a paper by zvi bern and his colleagues seemed to add collaberating evidence to some of those claims. he appeared to back up Lazar's claims about the strong force being related to gravity.

really though the best type of super magical matter stuff does not come from extending the ordinary periodic table but by making alternate periodic tables A'la Startrek. we know that unusual particles can combine temporarily into atoms. for example kaonium and muonium are extremely short lived atoms of kaons and muons respectively. they are unstable but so is a neutron if it is not bound in a nucleus. it may be possible to stabilize something like kaonium if enough atoms of it were bound together in a metallic bonding scheme or something like that. also several types of synthetic monopoles have been observed in experiments. monopoles are so small that if they formed atoms the nucleus would be 2000 times smaller than a regular atomic nucleus. this means the nuclear and electronic bonds would be very short and the shorter those are the stronger they are. this would lead to extreme resistance to melting and breaking of the bonds. it also means extreme density. too much of this stuff shaped so that it does not exceed the swartzchild radius in any direction would result in a mini black hole. you would not want any piece of this stuff to exceed 1.3 CMs in diameter.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

You have now gone beyond my knowledge in this area so I will bow out and accept your position. My only other point would be we need human exploration.

Probes can only tell us so much.

well i think you would be interested in an article on a cloud city on venus then. pertinent facts the upper atmosphere of venus is not crushingly dense nor especially hot. it's actually a fairly earth like environment in many ways more hopitable than the surface of mars.

www.universetoday.com...

and there were a few articles that elaborated on this theme just a fe days ago that you could google

a floating facility on venus would have near earth gravity. protection from radiation, available oxygen and other resources, is self floating, would not face explosive decompression danger (hull breach would result in a slow leakage of air) it is warm but not burning hot, is pressurized to earth norms...would be shirt sleeve if not for the acid and wrong gas mix.

venus is not all bad and up in the air- it is rather nice. nothing like it's nasty surface conditions.

While the surface of Venus appears a forbidding place for life, the clouds of Venus are another story.

Geoffrey Landis, an astrobiologist for NASA, once wrote a paper making the case for the possibility of bacterial life in the clouds of Venus. He noted that there are certain imbalances in the chamical make-up of the atmosphere of Venus that may suggest biological processes.

3.3 Present Life

Could bacterial life exist in the atmosphere of Venus today? Although this is considered unlikely, the possibility of life in the clouds or the middle atmosphere of Venus has not been ruled out by any observations made to date. While the atmosphere is both dry and acidic, extremophilic life has adapted to far more harsh conditions on Earth.

There is some evidence that the trace-gas constituents of the Venus atmosphere are not in chemical equilibrium with each other. On Earth, the primary source of disequilibrium in the atmospheric chemistry is the activities of biological processing; could disequilibrium on Venus also be a sign of life? In 1997, David Grinspoon made the suggestion that microbes in the clouds and middle atmosphere could be the source of the disequilibrium. In 2002, Dirk Schulze-Makuch independently proposed that observations of the Venus atmosphere by space probes showed signatures of possible biological activity...


...Another interesting sign is the nature of the ultraviolet-absorbing aerosols that form the markings seen in UV images of the planet (figure 2). The nature of these aerosols, and whether they are biological in origin, is still unknown. On Earth, viable microorganisms are found in clouds. A research team from the University of Innsbruck examined bacteria from cloud samples by freezing onto Teflon plates water droplets collected in-situ from cloud samples from Mount Sonnblick. They then melted the samples in the laboratory and monitoring bacterial growth at the low temperatures found in clouds. On the average, the cloud droplets contained around 1500 bacteria per milliliter, including round, rod-shaped and filamentary shaped bacteria, actively metabolizing at the cloud temperatures.
Because the bacteria multiply over a time scale of several days, shorter than the typical lifetime of a cloud, they concluded that the bacteria collected almost certainly reproduced inside the cloud. Cloud temperatures on Venus are similar to the range of cloud temperatures on Earth, although the Venus clouds are strongly acidic in composition. Nevertheless, identification of cloud-dwelling bacteria on Earth is a strong supporting evidence for the plausibility of bacterial life in the atmosphere of Venus.

Here is the complete NASA paper:

Astrobiology: The Case for Venus
NOTE: The link opens directly to a PDF file

here is a thread atthe NASA Advanced Concepts forum that discusses venus probes and then drifts into the specifics of living on a venus cloud city. details like breaking down sulfuric acid into water and then hydrogen and oxygen.

forum.nasaspaceflight.com...