Even though Mercury is closer to the Sun, Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system. Its thick atmosphere is full of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and it has clouds of sulfuric acid. The atmosphere traps heat, making it feel like a furnace on the surface. In addition to being extremely hot, Venus is unusual because it spins in the opposite direction of Earth and most other planets.
It also has a very slow rotation making its day longer than its year. The Latest. Mariner 2: First Spacecraft to Explore Venus. This page showcases our resources for those interested in learning more about Venus. Venus Resources. Ten Mysteries of Venus. JPL's lucky peanuts are an unofficial tradition at big mission events. Full Moon Guide: October - November A new paper details how the hydrological cycle of the now-dry lake at Jezero Crater is more complicated than originally thought.
This year, the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice dropped to 1. The lander cleared enough dust from one solar panel to keep its seismometer on through the summer, allowing scientists to study three big quakes.
Researchers will use Webb to observe 17 actively forming planetary systems. Scientists found evidence that an area on Mars called Arabia Terra had thousands of "super eruptions" over a million-year period. Full Moon Guide: September - October Cosmos » Astrophysics » The surface of Venus is geologically active. The study shows that these tectonic plates jostle and bump against one another like pack ice on a frozen lake, suggesting Venus is still geologically active.
Looking at the extensive Venusian lowlands, the team saw areas where large blocks of the lithosphere appeared to have moved, some pulling apart, others pushing together, and others sliding past one another. The find is significant because Venus was once thought to have a motionless, solid surface just like Mars or the Moon, rather than a geologically active, moving surface.
This gives us reason to think that some of these blocks may have moved geologically very recently — perhaps even up to today. The new study is part of a renaissance in interest surrounding our neighbouring planet. Instead of searching Earth for the missing material, Bottke decided to probe the computer code responsible for the predictions.
Current models suggest that an asteroid hurtling toward Earth should make a crater about 10 to 20 times as large. In his re-examination, Bottke found that craters should be closer to 24 times as large as the object that created them. The Chicxulub asteroid, for instance, would only have been about 4 miles long, instead of the 6 miles normally cited. This matters for Venus because scientists use crater sizes and numbers to estimate the ages of planetary surfaces.
Just as trees form rings as they grow, planets without active surface geology accumulate craters over millennia of impacts. By matching a planet's blemishes to the known population of space rocks, scientists can work backward to trace its impact history and get a rough estimate of its surface age.
Previous estimates for Venus relied on the handful of objects known to orbit the inner solar system a few decades ago. Since , NASA's Spaceguard effort has been working to identify and monitor over 90 percent of these near-Earth objects larger than 0. When combined with the revised scaling between asteroids and craters, Bottke found that the estimated age for Venus' skin would change significantly: down to about million years old.
McGovern also pointed to research from that suggested crater floors on Venus are filled with basaltic lavas, leading the authors to estimate a planetary surface age of about million years—close to Bottke's range. According to McGovern, this research is still being debated, which makes the new results even more significant.
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