Tag: space

Venus

This video makes it look like Venus is much closer to the sun than it actually is (100M km) but still, well done.

2014-07-02: Colonizing Venus

If the thought of Thanksgiving Dinner on Venus gives you the heebie jeebies, you don’t even need to think about plunging into the roiling atmosphere with nothing but a cheap plastic heat shield and a thin balloon to save you from the crematorium that yawns down below. Dangle the bird into the depths of the Stygian hell, feast as someone who walks between worlds and lives on an airship that rides the hell born winds 48km above a surface so hot it glows visibly red.

2014-07-03: Venus is a good fraction of solid surface in the solar system.

2020-09-18: Phosphine on Venus

observations indicate a level of phosphine at 20 parts per billion. That may sound low, but it turns out that from what we currently know, on Venus it’s hard to make anywhere near that much. The phosphine was seen at altitudes of at least 50 km. The environment there is pretty hostile to phosphine, which would decompose fairly rapidly. They estimate that that it should all be gone in less than 1 ka at that level, and probably much faster. So something must be actively making it to keep the levels up. But what?

2021-01-14: Jupiter killed Venus?

we present the results of a study that explores the effect of Jupiter’s location on the orbital parameters of Venus and subsequent potential water-loss scenarios. We argue that these eccentricity variations for the young Venus may have accelerated the atmospheric evolution of Venus toward the inevitable collapse of the atmosphere into a runaway greenhouse state. The presence of giant planets in exoplanetary systems may likewise increase the expected rate of Venus analogs in those systems.

Mars is brutal

Mars One wants to establish a human settlement on Mars, and fund this decade-long endeavor by involving the whole world as the audience of an interactive, televised broadcast of every aspect of this mission, from the astronaut selections and their preparations to the arrival on Mars and their lives on the Red Planet.

There are already over 80k applicants and there is only one way to get voted off the island: out the airlock.

2023-01-12: A cogent anti-Mars case

we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

Baikonur

“Whatever falls from heaven, you may keep.” So goes the unwritten law of the Kazakh steppes. A law avidly adhered to by the inhabitants of a small village, who collect the space debris that falls downrange from the nearby Baikonur space station.