Active Volcano On Venus Shows It's a Living Planet - Slashdot

Active Volcano On Venus Shows It's a Living Planet

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Our solar system's ice giants are the ones with diamond rain, not Venus. That said, Venus surely is a very minerologically interesting planet. There's even semiconductor frosts and/or snows, possibly of more than one compound or form. Early on tellurium was considered a major candidate, but now galena is considered probable. The surface is sort of like a refinery, baking / eroding out compounds that on most rocky bodies normally stay well bound, and then precipitating them out elsewhere. It also shows signs of heavy differentiation / enrichment processes in its melts and long cooling times, both promising minerologically. There's also a lot of just plain weird stuff that we can only speculate at. For example, the longest riverbed in the solar system is there, and we don't even know what carved it (earlier speculation was sulfur, but today most speculation is on exotic low-temperature lavas).

Can the surface be accessed? Unambiguously yes. Even 1960s Soviet tech was able to handle Venus's surface. In some ways, Venus is easier to land on than Mars. It's been calculated that with the right trajectory, you could aim a large hollow titanium sphere at Venus, have it enter, descend and land all perfectly intact without any sort of heat shield, parachute or landing system. Venera 7 had its parachute fail and it still landed intact. The Venera probes lasted up to a couple hours with no cooling system at all, simply by a combination of insulation and a phase-change material that soaked up heat. Surface missions measured in days can be handled by battery-powered high-temperature heat pumps (as per work by Landis). RTGs and even solar can work on the surface, albeit with difficulty and reduced power densities (esp in the case of solar), for longer missions.

And for the difficulty, there's advantages beyond just landing. The atmosphere is so thick you can basically dredge samples, potentially even with your propulsion system. Not only is powered flight made easier, but unpowered flight is made much easier - even a small bellows balloon (accordian-like metal bellows, winched to decrease its volume and thus reduce lift) can lift a sizable payload, while tiny wings can maneuver it on ascent and descent (surface winds are very low). Returning to the hospitable middle cloud layer (the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside Earth) can be done with a phase-change balloon (lifting gas that condenses into a liquid at altitude, thus reducing lift and allowing the liquid to be collected in a pressure vessel to be released at the surface as a gas at will). And by changing altitude, the planet can be easily maneuvered across at high speeds (unlike most of the solar system). And of course at altitude, power is abundant for recharging, and normal Earth air (easily made from Venus's complex and resource-rich atmosphere) is a lifting gas.

(And no, the planet is not some sort of "acid bath" - there's no sulfuric acid at all at the surface, only SO2 - H2SO4 isn't stable there. And in the cloud decks, it's more like a sparse vog - while the individual particles are high molar, visibility is several kilometers. And huge numbers of materials are perfectly stable in H2SO4 (though it should be noted that that's not the only acid, the lower cloud layer for example appears to have a significant amount of H3PO4))

Indeed, the surface isn't even accessible to humans. The first types of suits that NASA was designing for Apollo were not soft suits, but rather hard suits - rather like the atmospheric diving suits that allow people to withstand incredible pressures. They're even more convenient for astronauts in that they don't hinder mobility as much as soft suits; they went with soft suits for the weight reduction. While an atmospheric diving suit-like spacesuit for Venus's surface would by no means be a trivial task, it's not some sort of unthinkable task, either.

It should also be pointed out that "Venus's surface" isn't just one place. There's radical temperature and pressure diff