Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about the mysteries of Venus and what the next generation of probes might teach us.
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Hey, jor Hey, if you had to move to another planet, where would you go? I don't know.
People seem to like mark a lot that sounds pretty cool.
Isn't it like really really cold, like colder than Antarctica? Does that sound cozy to you?
That's what I meant. I said it sounds cool.
Well, have you considered Venus? It's nice and toasty.
I heard it's a little too toasty for me.
So you don't want it too hot, you don't want it too cold. So then where would you go? You're interested in the clouds of diamonds on Neptune.
No, but I heard the Uh you know there's there are oceans in Europa that sound pretty nice.
Yeah, if you can hold your breath forever and you're like swimming in the dark.
All right, may I'll just stay home.
Was that one of Goldilocks's options? Why didn't she just stay home?
It was too homey?
Maybe?
Hi?
I'm poor handmade cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at U see Irvine, where the weather is always just right.
Oh yeah, it never rains or never gets cold.
It rains just the right them out and it gets just cold enough for you to sometimes have to zip clothed your fleece. You have it rough there Yeah, Well, we get to act like it's cold and we're all bundling up in front of the fire when it's only really like sixty one degrees.
One man's sixty degrees is another man's venus winter. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we take a tour of the chilliest and the hottest parts of the universe. We explore everything from the driest to the wettest, from the smallest to the largest, to the oldest to the youngest. All of the extremes of the universe are welcome intellectual fodder for this podcast, where we try to dig into why everything is the way that it is and why it's not the way that it's not.
Yeah, because it is a pretty cozy universe and a pretty cozy planet we live in. It seems to be not too hot and not too cold for us. It seems to be just about right for us and bears apparently, And so we like to talk about all the things in it and all the things that are there for us to explore and to learn about.
And as we cast our minds out into the universe, we discover that our little place, our little corner of the universe, This rock that we find ourselves on seems pretty wonderful and toasty. There's not a lot of other places in the Solar System you'd like to live.
Yeah, we're pretty lucky to have this nice blue planet here with a water that's liquid that we can swim around in and go to the beach and enjoy. And also not too hot that would you know, kind of crush us and melt us when we step outside. It's pretty nice. I would get it five stars.
Well, good thing, we'll only have one star or it would get too hot anyway. But a big question in my in astronomy is how often do you get Earth like planets? And one way that we ask that question is by looking at other Solar systems and wondering, how often do you get rocky planets about this size orbiting those suns at just the right distance. Well, it's not clear that that's enough. Just because you have a rocky planet in the habitable zone in the Goldilock zone, is that enough to make a planet a cozy place to live?
Yeah, And it's a pretty big question with huge ramifications, I think, because it can not only kind of affect where humans might go outside of the Solar System. But it also kind of tells you how rare life is in the universe. Are we super lucky at are we the only life in the universe or in our galaxy? Or are planets like Earth full of theminge plants and animals pretty common?
That's right, And it might also tell us something about the future of Earth and whether it will be habitable. We don't know how long planets like Earth are cozy places for life, or if they turn into crazy hot ovens or super dry, frozen DEAs. How long will Earth continue to be a nice place to live?
Yeah, and humans are not really helping in that department, are we. We're sort of not maintaining our house very well.
That's right. We're certainly heating up the planet. And it brings to mind our neighbors in the habitable zone. You know, when you look next door, over to Mars and over to Venus, you find a couple of very different examples for outcomes for planets that are pretty close to our neighborhood.
Yeah, we're always looking for other planets that might be habitable or might have been habitable. It's sort of like looking at your siblings and using them to gauge how well you're doing in life.
I see, why is my siblings so much hotter than I have?
Yeah, or cooler or as is my case, richer?
Exactly? Why is my siblings so much gasier.
That one I'm glad about?
Exactly? There are points of envy, but because those exo planets and other solar systems are so far away, we can see that they're there, but we aren't yet able to understand there are liquid oceans on the surface and little critters swoving around in them. But we can look around in our neighborhood and ask questions like why did Venus turn out so differently from us? What is it about Mars that makes it so frozen and inhospitable?
Yeah, and we've talked about Mars a lot on this podcast. I feel like we've talked about it's oceans and water and probs and things we send there and plans to go there, but we rarely talk about Venus. It's sort of like the ignored sibling of the Solar system, that's.
Right, And it's not just been ignored by this one podcast. It's been overlooked a lot by science agencies. Mars has been the target of rovers and missions and orbiters, but Venus has been mostly ignored for a long long time. So Venus needs some more attention.
Yeah, do you think that's why it's fuming right now? It's just doing there, feeling resentful that we're ignoring it.
There's always a favorite child, you know. That's true, even if everyone denies it. There's always a favorite child, that's right. You just hope that your favorite child is one of yours.
That's right, it's Jupiter. Jupiter's my favorite.
Well, what if we discovered our favorite planet is like in another solar system? Then would the Sun get mad?
Ooh, are you saying we might have children with other sons? Now I'm confused here about this family arrangement.
Well, you know, if we find beautiful planets around Alpha Centauri that are bigger than Earth and even more hospitable, then we might look for an upgrade.
Oh boy, you're already retiring to Earth. You haven't even found this better planet yet, and you're already looking.
I'm just saying, the sky's the limit. You know, the Earth is wonderful, but we don't know if it's the best thing out there. Always keep shopping.
You know, it sounds like you're suffering from a fomo fear of missing out on science fomos.
Fomo fear of missing out on Earth's.
But yeah, we're talking about Venus today because it's sort of an interesting planet. Like you said, it's right next to us, and it's very similar to planet Earth, right it is.
It has a lot of the same sort of initial conditions. It's about the same size, it's about the same density, it's very close to us, gets just about the same amount of sun, but its fate was very, very different than our.
Yeah, well we are here enjoying some blue oceans and beautiful mountain visas. Venus is pretty uninhabitable. I mean, it's pretty dangerous there, right.
Yeah, it's not a place you want to go on vacation.
But scientists think that maybe it was sort of like Earth at some point in the past, like maybe it had oceans in life and maybe underground water. So big question is what happened.
Yeah, it might be that Venus had oceans of water for billions of years and maybe even life swimming around there. But something happened a few hundred million years ago, and now it's toxic and scortching and nowhere you want to go. So it's a great opportunity to learn something about the fate of planets, maybe the future of the Earth. And recently NASA decided, finally, after decades of overlooking Venus, to send a couple new probes that way.
Yeah, it's pretty exciting. And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what will the new missions to Venus teaches. It's kind of a mouthful theer missions to Venus teaches.
Exactly, But I do feel like Venus has secrets and there are things we're going to learn about life or planets or geology that are unique to Venus. I really feel like it's got something for us to learn.
Do you think there's something interesting there in its history, like you want to dig into psyche maybe figure out what happened?
Yeah, I do think so. I think every planet in the Solar System has a crazy story.
You know.
It's sort of like you show up in this family when everybody's in their fifties and they're all already mad at each other, and there's these references to things that happened twenty years ago that nobody wants to talk about, and that's our solar system. We evolved on this planet very recently, and we have no idea what's been going on. Maybe Jubiter used to orbit really close to the Sun. Maybe there was another planet that got thrown out of the Solar system when things moved around. We're like in a Jonathan Friends and novel. Everybody's grumpy and nobody wants to talk about it.
Sounds like you speak from experience one of what the whites and family reunions are.
Like a large Jewish family, So there's a lot of these like feuds, you know, where people aren't talking to somebody else because of something that happened fifty years ago. I'm not joking. It's crazy.
And you also have kids in other solar systems.
Maybe not that I'm admitting on the podcast.
I mean, who listens to this anyways? Nobody, we know, nobody.
In my mother's generation, there was one branch of the family that only discovered in their thirties that they had a sibling who had been committed to a mental institution.
We had been told that is like a novel, man, Yeah, it was it Jupiter.
There's definitely a lot of drama there.
All right, Well, this is a pretty interesting question. There's an idea of exploring Venus, and so we're sending missions and so we want to know what are they going to find? And so as usual, we were wondering why people out there thought we could find in this interesting planet.
So thanks to everybody who participates in this segment of the podcast. We love hearing what you have to say about these questions. Now it's just because we love hearing your voices, we do, but also because it gives us a sense for what people out there might already know. So thank you very much for volunteering. And if you out there would like to participate in a future segment, please don't be shy and write to me at questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
So think about it for a second. Use your imagination. What do you think the Venusian probes are going to teach us? Here's what people had to say.
I don't know too much about Venus, so I can't really say for sure. But I do know Venus has really high temperature, and I know that it's got a weird atmosphere relative to ours. I know that it doesn't have any moons.
I know Venus is.
A good analog to talk about climate change and climate sensitivity to Earth. So maybe we'll uncover some more information that will help us figure out our own atmosphere and how it responds to things that we keep doing to our planet.
Well, last year we had the announcement of the phosphene, but I know the data has been reanalyzed since then and it's not as promising.
As they thought it was.
But I also know that the surface of Venus is crazy extreme. I remember this hearing the Soviet probs barely survived a couple minutes. I don't know how much our materials have changed since then, so I would think that the probes are going to be analyzing the atmosphere of Venus.
I've heard of vin Hewesen before, but I can't remember who that is or what he invented. But I'm sure that the vin Huesen probes are probing something to maybe find out about a planet or a moon, or probing some sort of planetary object.
Best guess answer here, since the core word and that is Venus, I would have to say that there are probes that have been sent or are being considered being sent to Venus, which would lead me to believe that they would learn about the atmosphere or possibly even the surface of the planet of Venus.
Oh, I like that Venusian.
Hmm, Like it's a name, it's a Venusian or Venusian.
I think it's Venusian. But one of our listeners, I think, was also confused. He was like, who is this Venusian guy? And what did he invent?
My question is, what if you had more than one Venus, would they be vn i or venuses? It sounds like Alexander the Great motto, bennie vieni vicy.
That's right, Venni vidi vici exactly Yes.
I came, I saw a bunch of Venuses I conquered.
Isn't one of those? I drank a bunch of wine. I came, I drank wine.
I want oh vini? Oh I get it. Yeah, maybe that's what we'll find in Venus, some great vineyards.
Yes, exactly right, the vineyards of Venus. That sounds like an excellent science fiction novel.
But it is interesting to think about what we'll find in Venus, Daniel, So maybe take us back to the basics, like what do we know about Venus?
Venus is remarkably similar to Earth. It's very close to Earth that it receives about the same amount of light. It's about the same size as Earth. It's like eighty percent the mass of the Earth, meaning that on the surface the gravity is like ninety one percent. And you know, showing up near Earth in the Solar system also means that it's made out of roughly the same stuff as the Earth. You know, the stuff in the Solar System as it forms, a lot of the gas collapses towards the Sun, and in the outer Solar system you have more ice. And that's why we have like rocky planets here, because the gas is stripped away as the Sun is formed. And so Venus and Earth are like made of two scoops of basically the same stuff, and they're very close to each other, and technically they're both in the habitable zone. If you look in other solar systems, it's very rare to find two other planets so similar, so near each other in the habitable zone.
Interesting, they're almost like fraternal twins, kind of like, you know, more from the same scoop.
Yeah, and while Earth is a very nice place to live, Venus is scorching and totally hostile and So, like a really deep and interesting question is what happened? Why did Venus end up that way? Is it because of its location our planet's really that sensitive to their location? Or is because there's some event in Venus's history, some one off, random thing that happened to it that changed its fate. And so this is a deep question in modern planetary physics.
Yeah, like maybe something happened to it that could also happen to us potentially exactly that we should be careful about it. Maybe humans happened.
To it exactly, and that might happen to Venus, so watch out.
But I guess the question is how close is it? You say, it's really close? Like what are we talking about? It? So it's closer to the Sun than we are, right, so wouldn't it be a little hotter.
It is closer to the Sun than we are, and so it is a little hotter. Yeah, but that doesn't account for it's incredibly hot temperatures, Like Venus on the surface is eight hundred and ninety degrees fahrenheit. That's four seventy c. Like you could melt lead on the surface of Venus ridiculously hot.
Wow, like you just had a block of lead on the surface, it would be in a glass basically would melt.
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons that it's so difficult to explore Venus. Like you try to land something on the surface of Venus, it doesn't last for very long because it's crazy. You know. Not only is it very very hot, but it's very high pressure. Venus has an atmosphere that's like ninety times the Earth pressure, so it's like being deep, deep under the oceans. So everything we you sent to Venus has melted and basically been crushed as it landed.
Wow, it's kind of interesting to think, you know, just because it is, as you say, very similar to Earth, Like it's almost like a copy of Earth, and it's in a similar place in the Solar System, but it's so different there, right, Like I would have thought that maybe just the distance to the Sun is kind of what determines your atmosphere and what it's like on the surface, But there's a whole lot more to living on a surface of a planet exactly.
And what we've learned recently from studying our own climate is that what's in that atmosphere totally determined the temperature on the surface. It's much more than just how much light is hitting you from the sun. It's where does that light go? And Venus is bathed in blankets and blankets of carbon dioxide. We talked about this intense pressure on the surface. Well, ninety five percent of its atmosphere is CO two.
Wow.
CO two is like a blanket, and so not only is it getting a little bit more sun than Earth is, but it's very very good at keeping that heat on the surface.
Wow.
Yeah.
COO two acts like a greenhouse effect right basically, and they have a ninety five percent greenhouse exactly.
They have a very intense greenhouse there, and that's why it's so hot. Is this crazy amount of CO two, this blanket that surrounds it.
I guess the question is how did it get so much CO two? But does it just occur naturally in the solar system?
Well, that's one of the deep questions about the formation of Venus because we don't think that it's been that way the entire time. As we study the models of Venus, we try to understand, like, how did it get there? That's exactly the question. People think that Venus started off in a very similar way to Earth, and so one question that we'll talk about is where this COO two might have come from. Is it from volcanism? Did something impact Venus? Where did all this come from? How did it end up with this crazy atmosphere?
Right, because I think Earth used to have mostly CO two, Like we used to have an atmosphere without any oxygen, and we sort of only have oxygen because of life basically makes it.
That's right, that's where the oxygen comes from. But you know, the issue here, I think is more the balance of the CO two with the other non greenhouse gases. Like we have a lot of nitrogen in our atmosphere, so if we had ninety five percent CO two, we also whatever a very very hot surface and so it's not as much the oxygen is like the nitogen that's keeping the Earth from overheating.
Yeah, and it's not just the air. There were also a sulphuric acid on Venus.
Right everywhere the Venus is covered in these clouds, so if you look at Venus through a telescope, you can't see the surface, which makes it like very secretive. And people were wondering, like what's going on on the surface of Venus. And before we had ever sent a probe there to like map its surface. People had no idea what the temperature was like. Before the sixties, scientists speculated like maybe there were oceans on Venus today, or maybe there's like a jungle like environment down there. Nobody had any idea because we couldn't see through those clouds, and those clouds are more than just blocking our view, as you said, they're made of sulfuric acid. It's not sure there, especially because the really high pressure means that even a gentle wind, you know, like five or seven kilometers per hour, would feel on Earth like a fifty kilometer per hour wind because you're just getting hit by so much stuff.
Wow, and it's suphuric acid, So it would just totally eat you up just to be out there in the wind.
Yeah, exactly. So it's not a very pleasant place to hang out.
But it's sort of not just kind of what's on the surface. There's also something kind of fundamental about Venus in that it doesn't rotate as fast as the Earth.
Venus is very weird because it rotates super duper slowly. Like the Earth takes twenty four hours to do one rotation, Venus takes two hundred and forty three Earth days, right, which is about the same length as the Venus this year. And not only that, but it rotates the other direction from the Earth. Most of the things in solar system are spinning the same direction that they're moving around the Sun, which is the same direction that the Sun itself is rotating. So everything is mostly in sync except for Venus and Urinus. Everything is rotating the same way. So Venus is rotating sort of backwards and super duper slowly.
Wow, it's like that sibling that just decided to go its own.
Way exactly, And it's really weird that it rotates so slowly. It means that like basically you have one day per year, right, Like the sunrises and sunsets are super rare on Venus.
You mean, like if I'm standing on the surface, I would only see a sunset once a year, or like once every two hundred and forty three days. And could that somehow explain what's going on or what happened to Venus because I imagine, you know, being spun around like the Earth, it's sort of like a marshmallow where everything gets sort of more evenly toasted. But you know, maybe not turning kind of makes you toast in one side more than the other side.
Yeah, it might be, although you know, the atmosphere I think transfers this energy around Venus pretty efficiently. But it might also be a clue as to what happened to Venus. If you look at the surface of Venus, you get some evidence that something happened dramatically, like four or five hundred million years ago, And it might be that Venus was like hit by some huge impactor that changed its spin. So it might not be that the spin is the cause of its overheating. It might be the clue as to what happened to Venus.
Oh wow, and this is pretty interesting. Venus has no moons, Like we have the moon and Mars's a couple of moons, but Venus has no moons.
Yeah, Venus has no moons at all, which is really really weird, and I think might be consistent with Venus getting smacked sometime in the past and sort of losing its moons along the way.
It's not that the moon's abandoned Venus like you would have. All Right, well, let's get more into Venus and what we know about its past and is there life in there and what are we going to learn when we send these probes to study it. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about Venus, the planet, not the I guess Greek goddess or is it Roman goddess.
I can never keep track of which ones are Roman and which ones are Greek.
It's all Greek to you mythology. But we are thinking of sending some pros or I guess our plants to send proser to study it because it might have an interesting past. Venus. Then you know, what do we know about Venus' past?
We don't know very much because of course we can only observe Venus today, but we can look at the surface of Venus and we can build models that try to tell us the story of how Venus could have gotten to where it is today, and that might reveal what it's past was like. And so you know, people go on their computer and they say, well, what happens to a planet in this scenario or in that scenario, and they try to come up with like simulated versions of planets that end up where Venus is today that can tell us a story about how we got from an Earth like planet to Venus today.
Right, because I guess the hypothesis is that you know, the Earth, the Venus, Mars, we all sort of formed together almost at the same time, I imagine, in the history of the Solar System, and there was a shower of comments that gave us water. It probably also gave water to Mars and to Venus, and so the ideas that maybe Venus and Mars also had oceans at some point in their history exactly.
And we now have evidence for water on Mars today, like we know that there is water on the surface of Mars and under but we think that Mars might have had liquid surface oceans for hundreds of millions of years early in its history, although then they probably evaporated. It didn't last for very long. Now, on Venus, people suspect that it might also have had liquid oceans of water, but in this case for maybe two or three billion years. There might have been a long period there where our solar system had like two blue jewels. Earth and Venus both very similar with lots of liquid water on the surface. And that's fascinating because we know that life started fairly early in the history of Earth. It didn't take a billion years for life to start. So if Venus had water on its surface for more than a billion years, you know that leads to the obvious question, was their life on Venus?
Wow?
But I guess a question now is how do we know this? Like, how do we know Venus had oceans for two billion years?
We don't know for sure. Right All we can do is look at Venus today and ask the question how did it get here? And we can look at its surface. There are a few little clues, like if you look at the pattern of rocks on the surface of Venus, then you can ask, like, how do you get those rocks and some geologists think that some of the rocks on the surface of Venus require water to form, Like you don't get this precise crystal structure, you don't get granite like rocks forming without water. Though I did read a bunch of papers from people who are like, no, there was never any water on Venus. Here's why. So there's definitely a lot of scientific controversy. And one of the problems is that we just don't have a lot of great data about the surface because Venus is so inhospitable, and because the clouds are so thick, and because we basically haven't gone there in thirty years since our instruments have improved.
Right, Yeah, it's been thirty years, it's time to visit. But I think the idea is that, you know, like when the Earth form, we had water, right, Like the Earth form with water, that water evaporated and then we got maybe showered with comets to replenish that water. And since Venus is so closed, it probably happened the same way, right, Like, it probably started with water and maybe it evaporated as well or not, and then must have also gone in water from commits.
Yeah, And the idea is then something might have triggered on Venus this runaway greenhouse effect. You get a little bit more CO two in your atmosphere, then things get hot. Then that makes more CO two like come out of the rocks that are on the surface and lead to evaporation of those oceans, which just leads to more greenhouse effect, which raises the temperature. And so it's this cycle that repeats itself. And so you know, you might have like a nice stable situation like we have here on Earth. You get too far away from that, it's just some dramatic thing that happens that kicks you off of that stability. Then you could veer off into this crazy hot inhospitable climate like they have now.
It turns into sauna basically.
Yeah, exactly, and you could evaporate like all the oceans. Imagine evaporating all the oceans from Earth. It's crazy to think about, right. The Pacific is huge, but relative to the size of the Earth, it's like this very very thin layer of water on the surface.
And so you're saying that a big question is could life of form during those billions of years that Venus had water? Like, is there life there? Now?
We don't know. We don't think there's a lot of life living on the surface, because it's a pretty crazy environment. Although there was a report in September of twenty twenty that they discover this compound in the clouds of Venus, phosphine pH three in very high concentrations, concentrations that were much higher than could be explained by like volcanoes. This is something which is typically produced by life. So for a little while, everybody was very excited, Oh my gosh, did we discover life in the clouds of Venus. Because far up in the clouds it's much cooler and the pressure is much much lower, so it makes sense for something to like maybe be living up there.
Oh I see. Interesting. They found like basically like the farts, more farts than would be normal in a rocky planet, and so they thought, hey, maybe there's something there. But it would, like you said, would have to be living sort of in the clouds.
It would have to be living in the clouds, which is kind of cool, right, imagine like microbes floating in the clouds because up there, you know, the pressure is reasonable. The problem is that you can't go to Venus and sample these clouds very easily, and so the day to day got was from telescopes looking at light reflecting off the atmosphere of Venus. And you know that by looking at the light you can tell what's there because different kinds of things glow in different frequencies. Every different element has its own fingerprint. So they thought they saw this dip in the frequencies right where phosphine would be absorbing light. But then later people went and looked at their data and try to examine it themselves, and they didn't see the same thing. And so that result got a lot of press, but it was almost instantly debunked.
Oh no, it was a misfire.
It was an error in fitting. It was like in the mathematical analysis, they put in a very flexible polynomial and it could basically be consistent with a little dip. But if people come in with other models, like other arbitrarily chosen functional forms, they didn't see the same result, which means it's probably just an artifact of how they did the analysis.
You would think they would do more tagging before enouncing it to the public.
Yeah, you know what they did is they checked with another telescope. They're like, let's look at life from a totally different instrument and they saw the same thing. That's cool, but they used the same analysis method on both telescopes, so that I think was a little bit tough. That's sort of like my scientific nightmare, you know. I talk about a scientific fantasy of being like discovering something new that blows everybody's minds. That's awesome. Scientific nightmare is like going out there with a big result and then very quickly discovering that you made a silly mistake.
Wow, and that you're naked maybe when the press shows up at your door.
That's the scientific equivalent of being naked. But there are a lot of really interesting things about Venus that we do know and that are solid. Like, for example, we can look at the surface of Venus by shooting radar through the clouds, and Venus's surface shows a lot of really interesting, very weird hints as to what might have happened to it.
You mean from the rock formations and the tectonics.
Yeah, so Venus doesn't have tectonics. But we can look at the surface of Venus, and we can look in the craters of the surface, and by looking at the craters you can tell something about sort of like the age of the surface, because if something is being like constantly remade, if you have a planet with the like constant volcanic eruptions, then any creators are going to get smoothed over. And if we look at the surface of Venus, we see a lot of huge craters that data life like three four hundred, five hundred million years ago, and then very little has happened since then. So it's sort of like something happened a big deal five hundred million years ago, a lot of craters, a lot of overturning, a lot of refreshing on the surface, and then since then, basically it's just been steady, like it's been frozen since then.
Could it be the atmosphere, like is an atmosphere may be protecting the surface from getting you know, remade by other falling asteroids.
Right, you might think Venus has a very thick atmosphere and so it doesn't it protect it from meteors. And it's true that we have a nice blanket and when rocks hit our atmosphere, they burn up and that's what gives you shooting stars. But the kind of rocks that make these craters, these are big guys, and they just blow right through the atmosphere. So even Venus' thick atmosphere won't protect it from the kind of things that create these craters. Nice, and so it is really interesting puzzle about, like what's going on there? Are there still active volcanoes on the surface. Did something hit Venus five hundred million years ago and like boil its oceans and cause this runaway greenhouse effect?
Wow? Whereas I gues, if you look at Earth, you know, we have a relatively smooth surface, Like we don't have giant craters that you can go see.
That's right. We have a couple, right, like meteor Crater in Arizona. But yeah, we have a lot of activity on the surface. We have water, we have plate tectonics, We've got a lot of stuff sort of refreshing our surface early often we have bulldozers exactly. We've got new malls being built every year. I think you should just rebuild that mall. You're tearing it down already.
Yeah. Those really make the surface pretty dull too.
There are some strip malls here in Orange County. I would like to see get hit by.
A media or are we the bulldozer? I guess, but you said that we have like radar images of the surface of Venus. I guess we got that from Probes, right, that we've sent before in the past.
Yeah, So Venus used to have a lot of attention. Like in the nineteen sixties, Venus was a sexy place to look. Scientifically, people were wondering, like, maybe there's life on the surface. We don't know what's going on. Between sixty two and like nineteen ninety, there were like eighteen missions to Venus. Like you have to understand, it was the premier place to send your stuff. First spacecraft to reach another planet that was to Venus. The first thing to land on another planet, that was Venus. The first picture is from another planetary surface. That was Venus. The first planetary atmosphere were measured, that was Venus. So wow, everybody was looking towards Venus for decades and decades and decades. We sent lots and lots of these things.
Was it because it's just closer, and so that's the first one we tried.
It's closer and it looks more like Earth, Like you can look at Mars and you can already see because they are in clouds. There are not oceans on the surface, there's nothing teeming on its surface, it looks like a desert. It doesn't look very attractive from a life point of view. But Venus was hidden by these clouds, and so people didn't know, like, are there oceans on the surface like today? Are there fish swimming around in them right now? We didn't know the answer to these questions until a few decades ago when we started sending probes and then we discovered, Wow, it's crazy hot on the surface, it's very intense, and it doesn't look like there's anything going on right now.
Wow.
Interesting. It was the fact that it was veiled in mystery that made us want to go see it.
Yeah, And again it's more earth like, like Mars is much smaller than Earth or Venus, and so it's harder for it to hold onto its atmosphere. It doesn't have a magnetic field, it's further away, it's cold, and so Venus really is a better candidate. Like fifty years ago, if you had to bet where were you more likely to find liquid water and life, you would definitely have bet Venus.
Interesting. But then we sort of went there, we saw that it was a kind of a crazy place, and so then we said forget about it, or what.
This is really interesting transition in sort of NASA's priorities and the worldwide scientific priorities. In the late eighties, we sent some missions and we mapped the surface using radar. Magellan, for example, map the surface using radar, and we discovered that, like, wow, Venus is super hot and crazy and basically just covered in these lava like planes. And then people started to get more interested in Mars because there's something you can do on Mars which you can't do on Venus, which is you can like send a rover there and it can last for more than like an hour and last for like a year. It can drive around and they can do science. And then people started to get hints that, oh, there might still be water on Mars today, right, we can't see if from Earth there's no huge oceans, but there might still be ice. There might be like water, like not far from the surface. So NASA has this real emphasis to like follow the water. And once Venus didn't look very hospitable and Mars started to look more attractive, basically the whole community shifted over and started sending stuff to Mars, and so Venus has been ignored for decades ever since.
Interesting it's really driven by this idea of life, right and is there life there? And could there be life there? Could our lives go there and move there. It's really driven by that, it seems.
Yeah, and for a good reason, Like it's one of the deepest questions in science, right we want to know is their life on other planets? And is their life today? Was their life billions of years ago? Really fascinating to questions if we find life on those planets, could there have been contamination from Earth? Because you know, every time a huge rock hits Earth, bits of Earth get blown off and could land on Mars. We find bits of Mars on the Earth. So if you find life on Mars, you don't automatically know that life started in two places independently. It could have like right, already, the germs could have colonized Mars long before we sent our probes. So it's a really deep and fascinating question, and so I understand why NASA focus is on it. But there's this bit of a culture, is this Mars community. People do their research on Mars and they propose Mars missions. There's basically nobody left around in the community who has experience in Venus, and so it's harder to get a Venus mission funded.
Interesting, I wonder if that's something to do with the publication of the book. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Do you think that could have shifted things in a negative way.
Perhaps that might be you know, physics doesn't have a great record of gender balance, and so this could just be another example.
Yeah, because a book came out in the early nineties, I think right or late eighties.
I don't know what the causal effect is here, but you're right, it's suspicious timing.
All right, Well, let's get into what some of the pros that we've sent there before have found and what the new ones are aiming to find. But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about proving Venus and Daniel. We've sent several missions to Venus before, like you said, in the sixties and seventies.
What did they find, Well, it took a while to get something that would survive. I have it's tripped down to the surface. Like the Soviet Union sent a bunch of really awesome probes, but the first six of them were all failed. They were crushed in the atmosphere, barely surviving for like a few minutes to even measure the temperature. The first one to land on the surface and survive was in nineteen seventy. It's Venorous seven, and it lasted for twenty three minutes, and it measured a temperature of four hundred and fifty c. So that was like the first time we had landed something on another planet and made measurements. It was an awesome, awesome moment for humanity.
Wow, how did it land? Because I know, like to land in Mars you need these like balloons or these cranes and these rockets. How do we do it in the nineteen seventies? How do we land something in another planet?
So most of these things use parachutes because the density of the atmosphere is so thick, these parachutes are very very effective. Like landing on Mars is hard because it's hard to break in the air, and Venus it's not that big a deal. It's like landing on the bottom of the ocean. You know, you open a parachute and you can very gently float down, So that's not that hard. Problem is surviving the crushing pressure of that atmosphere and it's high temperature.
M I see yeah, because I think if you're standing on Venus, you're feeling about eighty percent of the gravity you feel on Earth, right.
Mm hmm, it's like ninety one percent, I think.
Okay, so it would feel like you're on Earth, except that you're at the bottom of the ocean.
Exactly, and every gust of wind would feel like a huge wave.
And also the ocean is made out of sophuric acid.
Exactly. I hope you brought your goggles. But they kept sending a series of these. So the Vendra nine, for example, is the first thing to ever take a picture from another planet and send it home. And I'd just like to imagine what it was like for those Soviet scientists getting this image from their robot from another planet. Imagine being the first person ever see one of these images and it's like coming across the screen. For those of you who remember what it's like to like download pictures from the Internet in the nineties and you get like a row of pixels and another row of pixels and another row of pixels, and they're in this moment like, what's it going to show us? Is there going to be an alien?
There?
Are we going to look at an ocean?
You know?
And if you look at the picture you can google it. You see it's just a bunch of rocks.
Well that's interesting. You're saying. All of these probes that we sent, the ones that made it, and the pictures they were all of Russian.
Yeah, the Soviets were really winning the Venus race back in the seventies.
I guess the race to discover that you don't want to go there.
Well, nobody knew, right, nobody knew, and you know, the Soviet science program obviously exceptional. I mean this is in the height of the Cold War and the space race, and so everybody's building lots of weapons, and everybody's building lots of space technology. And so from the point of view of like you got a physics project that has a huge price tag, not such a big deal. You know, people were shoveling money towards expensive physics projects in the eighties.
But like you said, this image is available online if you google, I guess Venera nine and Venus, and you can look at a picture of another planet like you were there.
Yeah, like you're there, somebody's boring vacation video, except it's from Venus.
And it sort of just looks like a desert, kind of like a rocky desert.
Yeah, exactly. So the air is mostly transparent, right, it's mostly CU two. You can see through it. It's not like Jupiter, where if you tried to descend, it would just become opaque and you're just like sitting inside of a cloud. Once you descend below the clouds that hover above Venus. You can see where you're going, but you know, it's pretty unpleasant once you get there.
And then the US started sending probes, right, yeah, that actually made it too.
Yeah, exactly. So we sent Pioneer Venus one, which orbited Venus for a long time and took data from orbit. Pioneer Venus two survived for a whole hour on the surface before being crushed, and so that was a big success. We also sent the Magellan, which made a very detailed radar map of the surface. It's on the basis of that that we know a lot about the geology of Venus, but also inspires a lot of our questions about what's going on on Venus and inside Venus.
Interesting it took a whole picture of the whole planet, or just like word land.
No, Magellan didn't land, and so it used radar to map the whole surface of Venus, and so we know, for example, what Venus looks like. It's basically seventy five percent low land lava planes, sort of like the ocean basins of Earth, except it's all lava, not like the ocean floor. And then there's two big continents sort of raised above it. One is like the size of Africa and one the size of Australia.
Wait, did you say lava like they are oceans of lava.
Well, it's like frozen, it's like cold lava. So the surface of Venus is mostly covered in these lowland lava plains.
You see solid lava, solid lava exactly.
We don't know if there's still volcanoes erupting on Venus today. That's one thing we'd like to understand.
I see, So the floor is lava and Venus exactly.
Yet one more reason not to book that trip.
And then we've also had more recent data for Venus from the Parker Solar Probe.
Right, Yeah, a lot of things we send to the Inner Solar System end up flying by Venus. It helps with like giving a gravitational slingshot and changing direction without burning fuel. So sometimes they fly by, like multiple times. So the Parker Solar Probe it's seven flybys. The solar orbiter is going to do eight flybys between twenty twenty thirty. So each of these as it flies by, it can take some data, take some pictures, this kind of stuff. But NASA every once in a while it puts out a call for missions, like suggest a new mission, and people all compete, like, oh, let's send something to Urinus, so let's send them into Pluto, and let's send something to Mercury. And the folks who work on the Venus missions have been proposing Venus missions for decades and getting shot down until very recently.
All right, so that's what we've learned before. What are these new missions going to learn or look for in venus?
So these are the first new missions since nineteen seventy eight. The first one is called DA vinci, which is a crazy acronym for deep atmosphere Venus investigation of Noble gases, chemistry, and imaging.
Right, just ignore the gases and you'll have a perfect acronym.
Huh exactly. And so this one has an orbiter. It's going to go around and probe the atmosphere, but also it's going to drop a dessent sphere. It's like one meter sphere. It's going to drop into the atmosphere and try to measure like what's in the atmosphere and take a bunch of pictures and use spectrometers to figure out exactly what components there are.
What do you mean like a the scent sphere like a balloon, or like just a little probe that looks like a like a ball.
It's like a probe that looks like a ball, and it'll have a parachute to slow it down and it might make it to the surface. But mostly here they're interested in like probing the atmosphere on the way down, so slowly descend. And you know, we've gotten much better at miniaturizing scientific instruments in the thirty years or forty years since we've been to Venus, so you can put much more refined scientific instruments like mass spectrometers, et cetera into these probes and get much more detailed measurements about what's in the atmosphere of these planets.
M I guess the attention now is sort of on the atmosphere, right, like could there be life up there? And what exactly is in those clouds?
Hm?
And those clouds can help us understand what might have happened to Venus's ocean, like was there an ocean there? Did it boil away? By understanding the exact chemistry of what's going on in the clouds, we're going to refine our models that try to describe the history of Venus, what happened to it? How did it end up being so crazy hot today?
Can we sort of tell from space if there's water in those clouds?
We can do some probes from space, but because they're opaque, it's not easy to penetrate in and see what's going on in the lower levels of the clouds, and only so they're really examined the top surfaces.
That's cool. When is that one launching?
So this one is not launching until twenty twenty eight. These were recent decisions by NASA to fund these two probes, and so they're building it and they're going to launch it in twenty twenty eight. But you know, Venus is pretty close. This is not like sending a mission to Pluto where you've got to wait ten years. It only takes a few months to get to Venus, and so we'll get some data pretty soon after it takes off. Assuming that this thing lasts for more than you know, a second in the atmosphere.
Wow, well, I think it was probably the acronym that got it approved. Pretty sweet, And that's one of two interesting ones that have been approved recently. There's also one going up in twenty twenty nine.
Yeah, so VERITAS it stands for Venus Emissivity, radio science, InSAR, topography, and spectroscopy. So that's an acronym that has another acronym inside of it.
It's a recursive acronym. It's such an acronym exactly.
This one's not going to go to the surface, but it's going to map the surface very finally using very powerful radar, and it's going to help us understand what happened to Venus by getting like an idea of the surface elevation and basically build a three D map of the surface.
Cool And again, getting to know the surface is important because just looking at the surface tells us a lot about the history of the planet.
Right exactly, like are there glowing links of lava right now? Or is anything cooled? Is there evidence there from like the heavy bombardment in the early Solar System, or has the surface been reshaped? And so a lot of our clues about what happened to Venus and whether something slammed into it three hundred million years ago come from this understanding of the geology of the surface. So this is really important data. It's going to be much much finer than the previous data we got from Magellan. Also, I love this project because it has one of these deep space atomic clocks on it. I remember we talked about how to measure time really really finely, and to navigate the Solar System with precision, you have to have very precise atomic clocks. Interesting, so they've built these miniaturized atomic clocks and they put a new version, deep Space Atomic Clock number two onto Veritas.
Wow.
Basically, like anything that helps anyone get there more on time is cool with me.
I'm all for it, exactly exactly. I just think it's super cool, these really precise atomic clocks built to go into space and these tiny little contraptions. I just think it's an awesome feed of engineering.
Well, these are going up in a few years, I guess seven or eight years from now, because I guess it takes a long time to get these missions prepared, to design them, and to make sure that they're going to work exactly.
And so kudos to the Venus community out there for continuing to propose these missions for decades, getting shot down over and over and over and over again, and finally succeeding and convincing those folks at NASA that Venus is worth a return trip.
And do you call them Venusians or V nine.
Venus Reegians.
All right, well, so stay tuned. Maybe in about ten years there'll be some new discoveries about Venus that maybe tell us a lot about life on the Solar system, how we got to be where we are, and maybe what might happen to us in the future if we're not careful.
Exactly, So look forward in about ten years to peeling back those clouds and revealing the truth of Venus.
Just wear you know, like iron gloves because they are sulfuric.
Save clouds, exactly, Take proper precautions, always wear eye protection, and don't sue us.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us Dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as Dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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