Venus hotter than ever: 3rd new robotic explorer on horizon
Venus is hotter than ever, with a third new robotic explorer on the horizon.
A week after NASA announced two new missions to our closest neighbor, the European Space Agency said Thursday it will launch a Venus-orbiting spacecraft in the early 2030s. Named EnVision, the orbiter will attempt to explain why Venus is so “wildly different” from Earth, even though the two planets are similar in size and composition.
NASA will provide EnVision’s radar.
NASA’s own pair of upcoming missions to our solar system’s hottest planet—called DaVinci Plus and Veritas—will be the first for the U.S. in more than 30 years. They’ll blast off sometime around 2028 to 2030.
“It’s a Venus hat trick!” tweeted NASA’s top science chief, Thomas Zurbuchen.
The Europeans have visited more recently, with their Venus Express in action around the hothouse planet until 2014. Japan has had an orbiter around Venus since 2015 to study the climate.
It’s a forbidding place: the thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere is home to sulfuric acid clouds.
“A new era in the exploration of our closest, yet wildly different, solar system neighbour awaits us,” the European Space Agency’s science director, Gunther Hasinger, said in a statement.
Source:https://phys.org/
Venus hotter than ever: 3rd new robotic explorer on horizon
‘Dyson sphere’ legacy: Freeman Dyson’s wild alien megastructure idea will live forever
Freeman Dyson may be gone, but his famous alien-hunting idea will likely persist far into the future.
Dyson, a quantum physicist who died at age 96 on Feb. 28, recalled in a 2003 interview just how he first advanced his concept of a “Dyson sphere,” which could betray the existence of an advanced alien civilization. It was via a 1960 article in the journal Science called “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation.”
Dyson wrote the article just as scientists were beginning to search for signs of alien intelligence using radio telescopes. The 1960 piece noted, Dyson said, that radio is a great medium for searching — but only if aliens are willing to communicate. If the aliens remained silent, you would need to look for their heat waste from space, using infrared sensors.