![]() ![]() Protection against cosmic radiation would be provided by the atmosphere above, with shielding mass equivalent to Earth's.It's time to land a car on Mars. At an altitude of 50 kilometres (31 mi) above the Venerian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the Solar System beyond Earth itself – a pressure of approximately 1 atm or 1000 hPa and temperatures in the 0 to 50 C (273 to 323 K 32 to 122 F) range. In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. Landis has proposed aerostat habitats followed by floating cities, based on the concept that breathable air (21:79 oxygen/nitrogen mixture) is a lifting gas in the dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, with over 60% of the lifting power that helium has on Earth. At cloud-top level, Venus is the paradise planet. However, viewed in a different way, the problem with Venus is merely that the ground level is too far below the one atmosphere level. NASA's Glenn Research Center has summarized the perceived difficulties in colonizing Venus as being merely from the assumption that a colony would need to be based on the surface of a planet: Here's related info that I've posted before:įrom. He said Venus was rightly a focus of scientific exploration, but that "a human flyby really wouldn't add very much." It's a hellish environment and the thermal challenges for a human mission would be quite considerable," said Prof Andrew Coates, a space scientist at UCL's Mullard space science laboratory. Of course, there are those who push back against such an idea. Izenberg said a Venus flyby "doesn't yet have traction" in the broader space travel community, although there are advocates within Nasa, including its chief economist, Alexander Macdonald, who led the IAC session. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets raises the question of how many might be habitable, and scientists want to understand how and why Venus, a planet so similar to our own in size, mass and distance from the sun, ended up with infernal surface conditions. There is also renewed scientific interest in Venus. "And it's not just going out into the middle of nowhere - it would have a bit of cachet as you'd be visiting another planet for the first time." "We need to understand how we can get out of the cradle and move into the universe," he added. "You'd be learning about how people work in deep space, without committing yourself to a full Mars mission," he said. That would make a crewed flyby trip to Venus a natural stepping stone towards Nasa's ultimate goal. Although the planet is in the "wrong" direction, performing a slingshot around Venus - known as a gravity assist - could reduce the travel time and the fuel required to get to the red planet. Izenberg said there were practical arguments for incorporating a Venus flyby into the crewed Mars landing that Nasa hopes to achieve by the late 2030s. ![]() ![]() A flyby would be scientifically valuable and could provide crucial experience of a lengthy deep-space mission as a precursor to visiting Mars, according to a report presented at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris last week. In its favor, however, Venus is significantly closer, making a return mission doable in a year, compared with a potentially three-year roundtrip to Mars. Walking on the surface would be an unsurvivable experience, so astronauts would have to gaze down at the planet from the safety of their spacecraft in a flyby mission. We're trying to make the case for Venus as an additional target on that pathway." The Guardian reports: There are notable downsides. "The current Nasa paradigm is moon-to-Mars. "Venus gets a bad rap because it's got such a difficult surface environment," said Izenberg in a report presented at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris last week. Noam Izenberg, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University's applied physics laboratory, is making a case for sending a crewed mission to examine Venus en route to Mars. ![]()
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