📖 About Venus

Venus is the second planet from the Sun and Earth’s closest planetary neighbor. Often called Earth’s “twin” due to their similar size (diameter 12,104 km vs Earth’s 12,742 km) and mass, Venus is in reality a hellish world with surface conditions lethal to any known life form. Its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere creates the most extreme greenhouse effect in the solar system.

With a surface temperature of 462°C—hot enough to melt lead—Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, even hotter than Mercury despite being nearly twice as far from the Sun. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is 90 times Earth’s, equivalent to being 900 meters underwater. Sulfuric acid clouds completely shroud the planet, and the atmosphere rotates 60 times faster than the surface in a phenomenon called super-rotation.

Venus rotates backwards (retrograde) compared to most planets, and extremely slowly—one Venus day takes 243 Earth days, longer than its 225-day year. This means the Sun rises in the west on Venus. NASA’s VERITAS (orbiter) and DAVINCI (atmospheric probe) missions are planned for the early 2030s. ESA’s EnVision orbiter will follow, creating an unprecedented fleet studying Venus simultaneously. In 2020, the controversial detection of phosphine gas in Venus’s clouds sparked debate about possible microbial life in the cloud layer.

🔭 Key Features

🔬 Science & Future

Venus offers a cautionary tale about runaway greenhouse effects. Scientists believe Venus may have had liquid water oceans and temperate conditions for up to 2 billion years before a catastrophic climate change turned it into the inferno we see today. Understanding what triggered this transformation is crucial for predicting Earth’s own climate future and assessing the habitability of exoplanets.

The upcoming DAVINCI mission will drop a probe through Venus’s atmosphere, sampling its composition during a one-hour descent. VERITAS will map the surface with radar at unprecedented resolution, searching for active volcanism. These missions will determine whether Venus is geologically active today and whether its highlands are truly “continents” formed by plate tectonics—potentially revolutionizing our understanding of terrestrial planet evolution.

📜 Discovery & Exploration

Venus has been observed since prehistoric times and is the brightest natural object in the night sky after the Moon. Ancient civilizations called it the “morning star” and “evening star.” Galileo observed Venus’s phases in 1610, providing evidence for the heliocentric model. The first successful interplanetary mission, Mariner 2, flew past Venus in 1962.

The Soviet Venera program achieved extraordinary firsts: Venera 7 made the first successful landing on another planet (1970), and Venera 9 returned the first surface photographs (1975). Later missions survived the crushing pressure for up to 127 minutes. NASA’s Magellan orbiter (1990-1994) mapped 98% of the surface with radar. After a three-decade hiatus, the upcoming VERITAS, DAVINCI, and EnVision missions herald a new era of Venus exploration.