The Venus Society Wiki



Welcome to the The Venus Society Wiki
These pages are about the exploration of the planet Venus.

'''The Venus Society exists to promote interest in the exploration of the planet Venus. Venus is the closest planet to Earth and the easiest to get to by spacecraft (see The Hitchhikers Guide to Venus ) yet it has been sadly neglected compared to Mars. Venus is the Earth's twin, but with its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, it is very different, yet just over 50km up in the atmosphere (The Goldilocks Zone ) of Venus is the only place in the Solar System where the pressure and temperature are similar to Earth. In the future humans could visit Venus and explore the surface by remote control or Telepresence, a real life Avatar, controlled from a base floating in the atmosphere. Venus could once have had oceans and it still has active volcanoes, lightning storms, and a dynamic atmosphere. '''

'We need to know more about this fascinating planet and this is the place for Venus enthusiasts to come together and make the 'case' for the' planet.





The Venus Society Highlights
Click here for shortcuts to a few pages you might like to look at about past and future missions to Venus, the planet's atmosphere and surface, and links to web sites.

Quotations
'''"Of all the planetary-science questions we have, the question of why are the Earth and Venus different is the most gigantic and fundamental unanswered question we've got," says Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and a researcher who studies planet evolution. "If scientists want to say they know anything about what makes for a habitable planet, she says, "We'd better be able to answer that one." '''

'''"In the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus. The advantages of the Venus atmosphere over other proposed space settlement locations includes an abundance of atmospheric volatiles, sufficient for life support, benign temperature and pressure, shielding from cosmic and solar-flare radiation, plentiful solar energy, and nearby access to the rocky (silicate) surface materials." Geoffrey A. Landis'''

"Venus, the “greenhouse planet”, is a scientifically fascinating place. In many ways it can be considered “Earth’s evil twin.” A huge number of important scientific questions need to be answered. At a temperature of 450 Celsius, and with 90 atmospheres of pressure of carbon-dioxide atmosphere, the surface of Venus is far too hostile to land humans upon, but we can put humans in the atmosphere to explore the surface via a rugged telerobot.. Was the early Venus temperate? Did Venus once have an ocean? What causes the geological resurfacing of the planet? What is the nature of the atmospheric superrotation? What is the "snow" on Venus mountaintops? Can we learn about Earth's climate from Venus?" (These are a few of the questions we need to answer) Geoffrey A. Landis'''

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