Akatsuki probe has second chance to study Venus 5 years later

[rustigsmed]

Nice little story regarding Japan's Venusian probe.

In 2010, Japan's space agency, JAXA, sent a probe to Venus. Akatsuki would have studied the climate and atmosphere of the hot, hot, hot world. Except it failed to insert itself into orbit and drifted off into space. But in December, the probe will have a second chance to enter orbit around Venus.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17432/japan-venus-probe/

Fingers crossed :thumbsup:

[ZeroID]

A cunning plan .....yup, fingers crossed.

[AussieTrooper]

Clearly that probe should have gone to Ceres and all would have been fine ;)

(Akatsuki means dawn in Japanese.)

[sil]

harder to study venus from ceres though ;) hope it goes well and hope we get around to colonising venus as well as mars.

[LewisM]

Colonising Venus???????????????????? Not very likely

[lazjen]

It could be done.

There's a couple of ways to go about it. One suggestion is to have the colony in the clouds at a suitable level. Interesting, but risky.

Another way is to terraform it.

Either way would require a lot of effort, time, tech, etc to achieve. I think it would be a great experiment to try terraforming it.

[rustigsmed]

more likely than Mars...

Although the surface of Venus is an extremely hostile environment, at about 50 kilometers above the
surface the atmosphere of Venus is the most earthlike environment (other than Earth itself) in the solar
system. It is proposed here that in the near term, human exploration of Venus could take place from
aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere, and that in the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the
form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030022668.pdf

[LewisM]

Mere walking at ground level in an atmosphere that dense would be exhausting in mere minutes. All work would have to be robotic.

[AussieTrooper]

We still can't convince our own politicians that carbon dioxide is having an effect on earth. Good luck getting them to provide funding to do something about it on Venus...