Everyone sees the brilliant “star” after sunset but few realize what a crazy place it is: Earth’s evil twin planet Venus.
Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is closest in size, but she’s a real bitch! What makes her beautiful—a global cocoon of clouds—also makes her the hellish sibling in our planetary family.
Reflecting more than 75 per cent of the sunlight that hits her, Venus’ clouds may look pure and innocent, but they are made up of deadly carbon dioxide.
That envelope of deadly gas is up to 40 miles thick in four layers, the upper two whipping around at speeds of 100 to 250 miles per hour. The third layer is tamer and rains down corrosive sulfuric acid. However, that toxic rain never reaches the surface, as it evaporates in the lower atmosphere from the intense 900-degree heat caused by the runaway greenhouse effect of the cloud system.
Talk about global warming…everywhere on Venus is hot as hell. Imagine a world where there is no escape from a constant 860-degree F. heat day and night!
What that does after millions of years is create a landscape of soft rocks where an ominous orange glow of sunlight is reflected around the surface by the tent-like clouds. There is no night on Venus, just an eerie glow like earthly twilight.
Seen in earthbound telescopes from 25 million miles away, the clouds of Venus obscure any details, creating a mystery and imagination that has just recently been unraveled.
Remarkably like Earth in size and weight, the atmosphere and surface of Venus couldn’t be more different. At 7,520 miles wide, it is just 400 miles less then Earth.
The globe itself is covered with volcanoes, it is incredibly level with no ocean-like depressions and just two continents, Ishtar Terra and Aphrodite Terra, named for the Babylonian and Greek goddesses of love. All the features of Venus have female names.
Everywhere are millions of square miles of scorched plains. Thousands of volcanoes of various types have been discovered, but do they lie dormant, or not? A few are known to erupt as the lava has been seen seething across the planet, creating a Dante’s inferno that smooths the surface.
Curiously, there are about 1,000 craters from meteor impacts, while lava rivers meander between fractures, rifts and global cracks. The landscape has little wind and obviously no water, the main erosion being an atmospheric acid reaction that has flattened most of the surface rocks like alien cow pies.
But the weirdest thing about Venus is the length of its day and year. Would you believe that the time between two sunrises is longer than it takes the planet to orbit the Sun? Venus’ “day” is longer than its year! While it orbits the Sun every 224 days, the time from sunrise to sunrise is 243 of our days. How’s that possible? Venus rotates backwards…that’s right backwards!
If you can visualize our entire Solar System from billions of miles above Earth’s North Pole, you would see that almost all the planets, their moons and even the Sun all rotate on their axis in a counter-clockwise direction. (All orbits of the planets and most of their moons are also counter-clockwise, or right to left.)
There are two exceptions in this Solar System celestial spin: Venus and Uranus. The giant seventh planet is knocked over on its side and it rolls around the Sun like a wheel.
While Venus orbits the Sun in 243 days (counter-clockwise like the other planets), this red-hot globe rotates extremely slow in a clockwise (left to right) direction. Venus is lucky it isn’t locked in a daily rotation that keeps the same side towards (or away) from the Sun, like most moons that orbit around their parent planets.
All this technical celestial mechanics is important to understanding the dynamics of Venus. After all, scientists didn’t figure out this strange rotational anomaly of Venus until 1996.
In fact, until the 1960s, it was thought plausible that Venus had a surface of lush, jungle-like vegetation with abundant water and new species of live organisms. A near 24-hour day was assumed. What changed all that thinking?
American and Russian space programs practiced their infant rocket and satellite designs on Venus and Mars in the 1960s, justifying the public dollars with the ground-breaking science.
The Soviets really got obsessed with Venus, first thinking they’d find alien life (maybe to convert to Communism?), then sending some of the heartiest spacecraft ever built to land on an alien surface as hot as a blast furnace.
The Russian probes called Venera were highlighted by landers that sent a quick weather report, sniffed the atmosphere, and snapped some impressive photos before the heat fried the electronics and the heavy atmosphere crushed the vehicle like a soda can.
Four successful Venera landers in the 1970s sent back our only images to date of the bizarre Venusian surface. We saw those four alien landscapes years before orbiters visualized the entire, volcanic global mayhem.
NASA sent spacecrafts called Pioneer and Mariner in flybys of the planet in the 1960s and ’70s that revealed a few of Venus’ secrets. But it was the versatile orbiter of the 1990s called Magellan that spent years filling books full of today’s knowledge about Earth’s crazy sister.
Magellan, named for the 16th Century, Portuguese navigator, was truly a flagship of NASA’s attempt to perform a long surveillance mission on a planet. Magellan was put in space by Shuttle Atlantis and orbited Venus with powerful, cloud-piercing radar from 1990-94. It was an important prototype for NASA’s interplanetary orbiters: Galileo around Jupiter from 1995-2003; Cassini at Saturn 2004-2017; and several Martian orbiters including currently operating Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The European Space Agency had an orbiter called Venus Express from 2006-2014 that filled in the blanks left by Magellan.
What made Venus the way it is? There are plenty of theories. Could Venus be a model of what Earth will look like in a billion years or so? Maybe. It’s a lesson in runaway global warming in the extreme.
Tonight, take a different look at Venus as it lingers high in the early evening sky. It’s not such a bad planet—when seen from Mother Earth.