Why don't we explore Venus if it is much closer to Earth than Mars?
What is the closest planet to earth? No, it's not Mars. Although Mars is a famous planet,
the title of the closest planet does not belong to it. If we talk about distances, Venus is
the closest planet to the earth, although on average, Mercury spends more time near
the earth than Venus. How is this possible? And if Venus is the closest planet to Earth,
why aren't there so many missions to explore it?
Let’s go! " We live in a time when space exploration is
seriously thinking about reaching Mars in the coming years. Even the wealthiest man
in the world, Elon Musk, has repeated ad nauseam his goal of wearing the first generation of
humans to the red planet as soon as possible. Currently, this goal is increasingly realistic,
and some space agencies such as NASA already have programs that seek to take the first
steps to colonize Mars; even so, faced with this panorama, it is valid to ask ourselves,
why is this obsession with visiting the red planet and not another, like Venus, which
is much closer to earth? First, why did we say Mercury is the closest
planet to Earth? Aren't Mercury, Venus, and Earth supposed to be in the order of closeness
to the Sun? In that case, Mercury should be much further away than Venus, right?
The thing is that since Mercury spins very fast, on average, it spends more time close
to the Earth than Venus, which spins slower and therefore spends less time away from the
Earth. But that's just on paper; in practice, it's
completely different. If we talk about actual space travel, Venus is closer than Mercury
since the distance between Earth and Venus is shorter than the distance between Earth
and Mercury. So saying that Venus is closer is not a mistake.
But, if we look at it from that point of view, Mercury is even further away than Mars since
to reach Mercury, spacecraft must accelerate using gravitational assistance for years,
while to reach Mars, we can take advantage of the approach gaps between Mars and Earth
every 26 months and arrive in less than a year, so… What is the closest planet to
the Earth? Leave us your comment if you would like us to make a video answering this question!
Returning with Venus, for centuries, it would have been inconceivable that Venus stop being
so perceived by the scientific community as in the modern era. In the eighteenth century,
Venus was the main reason astronomers and scientists around the world organized themselves
to discover the solar system's mysteries. When humanity could finally make the leap
and leave the planet with spaceships, the first place it reached was Venus. It was our
first successful planetary encounter beyond Earth and the first planet on which humans
placed their technology. Venus and Earth are practically twins. They
are similar in size, density, gravity, and physical composition. Both are in our star's
habitable zone and are relatively close to each other. And yet, at some point in the
solar system's history, Earth became a cosmic paradise for life as we know it, and Venus
became a hostile, scorching hell where no form of life can exist. Why?
In previous videos like this one, where we explained how much you would weigh on each
planet in the solar system, "Place thumbnail of the video where we talked about how much
you would weigh on each planet," we mentioned the harsh conditions of the planet Venus.
If a spacecraft wanted to land on the surface of Venus, it would first have to deal with
the acidic, toxic cloud-filled atmosphere that corrodes metal and degrades any electrical
components. Once on the surface, visitors would encounter average temperatures of 430°C,
a heat that would melt any spacesuit. To all this, dense clouds are added that are
present all the time and cover the rays of light, so the sky is orange, full of storms,
lightning, and acid rain that melts everything it touches.
Do not forget that Venus suffers from a lasting greenhouse effect, so extreme temperatures
are constant and do not vary according to the place. That means winter doesn't exist
on this planet, so there's no escape from the extreme heat.
As if all this were not enough, the atmospheric pressure on Venus is about 90 bars, equivalent
to being submerged 1 km at the bottom of the sea; as you can imagine, no human or living
being could survive in such extreme conditions, or that is what we believe.
Twins separated at birth Years ago, the Kepler space telescope discovered
more than 3,000 planets around other stars, many of which are orbiting in habitable zones
where water could be stable on the surface. These "Earth 2.0" are located hundreds of
thousands of light years away and are difficult to study with modern technology since we barely
receive minor points of light. Conveniently, there is an Earth 2.0 right
next to ours. It is Venus; studies on the atmosphere of the second closest planet to
the sun have shown that there is a high probability that in the remote past in the history of
Venus, this was a planet covered with water like the Earth; it is even likely that it
had oceans, and perhaps, also vast forests full of life.
Of course, there is no way to prove this at the moment. Still, by understanding the history
of Venus, we will also better understand the history of Earth and the nature of potentially
habitable exoplanets. Also, while scientists and policymakers grapple
with climate change, they can look at Venus because for Venus' atmosphere to have gone
from being a paradise-like Earth to the hell it is today, something extraordinary had to
have happened. According to experts such as Bob Grimm, director
of the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute, the Earth will
not become Venus since that requires amounts of carbon dioxide that our planet does not
possess. Still, Venus has many lessons about how the Earth's climate can evolve in the
future, and a better understanding of these processes will help us be m prepared for climate
changes in the next few years. With so much to learn on a planet close to
Earth, anyone would wonder why NASA stopped exploring Venus. Why is it that, being such
a vital planet, not so much effort is made to explore it?
Money On the one hand, there is not enough money.
NASA receives half of 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget for its space exploration projects
and missions, and only a fraction of that money goes to planetary science.
Second, it is much easier to explore our other neighbor, Mars, than to study Venus for many
reasons. Mars is farther away than Venus but also moves slower, so it's easier for our
spacecrafts to catch up, even if it takes a long time. On the contrary, Venus is closer
to the sun, which means that it moves much faster; because of this, it is also necessary
for our ships to acquire very high speeds that are only possible with gravitational
assistance. Mars does not melt the lead. Currently, the
rovers sent to the red planet are still in operation. Although their life periods were
initially only a couple of years, now they have useful lives measured in decades, thanks
to the fact that Mars is not so hostile to technology. It seems that it will also be
friendly with humans when we visit it. In contrast, any robotic mission to the surface
of Venus will be extremely short and highly risky; in fact, the record of the operation
of a spacecraft on the surface of Venus is 2 hours and was reached by the Venera 13 exploration
probe launched by the Soviet Union in 1981. It is understandable that NASA is not willing
to carry out a million-dollar mission just to obtain data for two hours. In addition,
Mars has a romantic appeal that Venus will never have. Humans will one day walk on Mars
and perhaps settle there in the coming years; this dream motivates us to continue researching
and exploring the red planet that will possibly be the second home of the human race in the
future; on the contrary, it is unimaginable to think that one day humans can set foot
on the surface of Venus. Venus, Earth, and Mars are three very similar
planets, all three are in the habitable zone, but only the earth has all the conditions
to have living beings and water in a liquid state. Studying both planets helps us not
only better understand their history but also helps us better understand our planet.
Life, the engine of exploration One of the biggest reasons space agencies
worldwide don't invest in exploring Venus is the human race's obsessive approach to
proving that we are not alone in the universe, that is, to find evidence of extraterrestrial
life. The question of whether we are alone in the
universe is too tempting for any space agency to resist. That's why so many rovers have
been sent to Mars: to determine habitability and, with the Mars 2020 rover, to find habitable
zones. This is why telescopes look for exoplanets
in habitable zones, solar systems with optimal conditions to host liquid water, and signals
that may come from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.
All our joint efforts aimed at the same goal, to find something, whatever can give us hope
that we are not the only ones in this vast universe.
Until now, one of the main goals of missions to Mars has long been to "find water" because
where there is water, there can be life, at least life as we know it, carbon-based and
oxygen-dependent. We cannot look for other types of life forms since life on Earth is
the only form of life we know of in the entire universe.
In this ongoing search for life, space agencies have set their eyes on Mars and the moons
of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, especially on those moons with large reserves of frozen
water. One of them is Europa (Jupiter's moon) and Enceladus (Saturn's moon), frozen worlds
that could have oceans beneath their thick ice sheets.
This relentless search for extraterrestrial life makes Venus unattractive for exploration.
At the beginning of the history of the solar system, it was thought that Venus had an ocean
on its surface; scientists came to this conclusion since asteroids and comets were the ones that
brought water to Earth for the first time, and also these were the ones that gave us
the essential components of life: amino acids and their precursors.
If this happened on Earth, it most likely also happened on the other solar system planets,
including Venus, then could life on Venus have evolved during that time? Earth has been
habitable for about 3.9 billion years. Mars was habitable for about 500 million years.
Jupiter's moon, Europa, could be inhabited at this time. Sadly, everything indicates
that Venus cannot have a life, because it no longer has the conditions it had in the
past; because of that, it has not been the protagonist of as many space exploration missions
as other planets. A new light for Venus fans
NASA recently announced two new missions to our closest neighbor in the solar system,
Venus. The main objective of these new missions is to understand how this planet transformed
into a "hellish world" despite having characteristics similar to Earth.
The two missions were selected within the framework of the ninth round of competitions
of NASA's Discovery program, which in 2019 launched a new call for proposals and since
1992 has promoted the development of more than 20 space exploration missions and instruments
that aim to understand the evolution of the solar system.
Both missions to Venus will receive initial funding of US$500 million each for their development
and will be launched between 2028 and 2030. The missions selected for the exploration
of Venus were: DAVINCI+ (Research of Venus in Deep Atmosphere
of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging) The DAVINCI+ mission will measure the composition
of Venus' atmosphere to understand how it formed and evolved and determine whether the
planet ever had an ocean. The mission consists of a descending sphere that will plunge through
the planet's thick atmosphere, making precise measurements of noble gases and other elements
to understand why Venus' atmosphere is a runaway greenhouse compared to Earth's.
And the second mission is VERITAS (Emissivity, Radioscience, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy
of Venus) VERITAS will map the surface of Venus to assess
the planet's geological history and understand why it developed so differently from Earth.
VERITAS will orbit Venus to map out the surface elevations of nearly the entire planet to
create 3D reconstructions of the topography and confirm whether processes such as plate
tectonics and volcanism are still active on Venus.
These new missions will be in charge of revealing the secrets of Venus that until now had remained
hidden and giving us information about how likely it is that there are living organisms
in the form of bacteria in its clouds. Would you like us to make a video telling
more details about these future missions to Venus? Let us know your opinion with your
valuable comment.