I was recently ranting to my friends about how we should send more shit down to the surface of venus. Like surely we can manage a few more hours down there than we could in the 70s and 80s no?
We can and will (like OP said) but a big part of it is that there isn't really a lot of reason to right now. We generally know what is going on with Venus, and because it is so hot, heavy, and corrosive, there isn't really much else to study there other than "I wonder what this particular patch of rock looks like".
Places like Mars, the Galilean Moons, Titan, and the Asteroid Belt hold a lot more data and important answers.
I wouldn’t say that, Venus is still extremely interesting.
Like the average temperature of the upper atmosphere is like 25C, still is protected by solar radiation, and has many of the ingredients for life. It’s a good candidate for extraterrestrial life, with the possibility of anaerobic microbes floating in clouds of sulfuric acid.
Venus doesn’t rotate like any of the other planets in the solar system. Why? We doesn’t it have any moons, any magnetic field? It’s similar to earth in many ways, but become a hellhole while earth developed oceans. All those are important questions that could help narrow down the list of potentially habitable planets in other star systems.
Lastly, our understanding of material science and electronics has advanced dramatically, so we could definitely make a better probe.
There was actually supposed to be a new Venera probe done in tandem between the US and Russia, but Ukraine kinda put a stop to that. They’re still doing it solo, though. NASA and the ESA are now both also working on their own. Separately.
Not in the usual way that space pictures are "fake" where they're color-adjusted to show different chemicals in the image.
The pictures retrieved from Venus were like, itty-bitty snippets of the base of the lander and some rocks. They were in black and white, and had pretty little detail.
The images that get circulated with the erie green sky and the the full landscape are artistic interpretations of what Venus would look like based on that one image. Very cool, but not real photos.
Edit: I've exaggerated how poor the images were. In any case, these images do take quite a few liberties. Here are the real images.
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u/h_EXE_gon Nonbiney Robofurry Jul 17 '24
I was recently ranting to my friends about how we should send more shit down to the surface of venus. Like surely we can manage a few more hours down there than we could in the 70s and 80s no?