Tag: Venus

Engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley report progress in installing a heat shield on the first private spacecraft targeted for Venus. Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California, is leading the effort, along with their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. NASA’s Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) was invented at the NASA Ames center. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, part of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, supported the development of the heat shield for Rocket Lab’s Venus mission. You…

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Impact features on Venus may have been staring us in the face all along That’s the message from a team of planetary scientists, who have explained Venus‘ apparent dearth of large craters by discovering that impacts could have produced the mysterious “tesserae” formations on the Venusian surface. Tesserae are large — sometimes continent-size — expanses of terrain that have been deformed and covered with wrinkle ridges, which make the landforms look like sheets of corrugated iron. They are formed by lava welling up to the surface, where it cools and…

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Scientists have observed something unexpected in Venus’ atmosphere — an increase in the level of deuterium relative to hydrogen. Okay, sure, that doesn’t sound like the most exciting statement. However, the consequences of this discovery could actually upend our current understanding of the amber world. As it turns out, it would affect our assumption that Venus is a perpetually barren, inhospitable planet. Here’s how. “Venus is often called Earth’s twin due to its similar size,” said Hiroki Karyu, a researcher at Tohoku University and one of the study’s scientists, in…

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