Goodbye Venus

1/8/05 – 1/14/06

By C. Zaitz

Venus has been a bright evening beacon for months, but now we must say goodbye to her evening apparition as she ducks in front of the sun. Her orbit takes her between us and the sun for a few days, but she will reemerge on the morning side of things by the end of the month. She won’t appear back in the evening skies until nearly next year, but her shiny crescent will cheer us up in the dark winter mornings.

Soon there will be a visitor to the planet Venus. The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched a probe called Venus Express and it will be arriving in April of this year. This probe was modeled on their Mars Express which arrived in Mars orbit in 2003. Mars Express is still there, sending back data on the atmosphere of Mars and even probing beneath the surface to look for water. These subsurface soundings are taken while the probe is 800 kilometers from the surface. The new Venus Express is modeled on the Mars mission, and many of the technologies that were developed for Mars are used for Venus Express. These Express Probes were meant to be efficient and quick to build and launch. Venus Express accomplished these goals – it was the cheapest probe of its kind. Even though it has the same design as the Mars Express, the ESA was able to modify the design to send it to a vastly different planet.

There hasn’t been a probe at Venus since the Magellan Mission of 1989. Magellan was designed to map the surface of the planet by using microwaves to penetrate her thick clouds to make images of flattened volcanoes and lava flows. Venus Express will study the planet’s atmosphere more than the surface. One of the reasons we’re so interested in Venus and her toxic cloak of atmosphere is that she is very similar to earth in size and composition. But it is clear that the history of Venus is very different than that of earth, since the average temperature on her hazy surface is around 900 degrees. Some scientists compare what we know about Venus to the earth, and some even worry that earth is susceptible to the same factors that made Venus so hot and uninhabitable. This is one of the reasons we send probes to study her atmosphere and surface. If we can learn more about Venus, hopefully we can avoid the same problems here on earth, since it’s clear that planets change, especially when their inhabitants help it along.

From here on earth, Venus still looks lovely when she rules the sunrise. While we’re waiting for her entry into the morning, we can still enjoy Mars and Saturn in the southern evening sky, and Jupiter shines in the south east in the morning.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the beautiful view!