Venus
These are the phases of Venus. Image courtesy http://wikipedia.org
Venus is the brightest thing in the sky other than the sun and the moon. Sometimes you can even see it before the sun goes down. Because of this, it is also known as the evening star or the morning star. In fact, people used to think that Venus was two separate, very bright stars. Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher and mathematician, was supposedly the first person to realize that Venus was actually one planet rather than two stars.
Venus was named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. I think it was named after this goddess because it is very bright and pretty. Venus shines so brightly because it is the second closest planet to the sun. It is surrounded by very thick clouds which reflect a lot of sunlight.
These clouds also make it very difficult to study Venus. Galileo was the first person to see Venus through a telescope way back in the 1600s, but he couldn’t see the surface. Most telescopes we have cannot see through Venus’ thick clouds.
This is Venus' surface. Image courtesy http://wikipedia.org
In order to study Venus’s surface, we need to use radio telescopes. These send radar through the clouds and back to earth for scientists to study. On August 10, 1990, the space probe Magellan went into orbit around Venus and circled until October 12, 1994. It gave us many maps of Venus by sending radio signals through the thick atmosphere and back to earth.
Venus’ surface looks a lot like our deserts mixed with some vocanos and LOTS of lava. In fact, most of Venus’ surface has been shaped by volcanic activity, with lava rivers, lave hills and lava plains.
It takes Venus 225 Earth days to go around the sun one time. But it takes Venus 243 Earth days to rotate on its axis one time, which means that a day on Venus is longer than a year! Venus rotates on its axis opposite of most planets in the solar system. Earth rotates from west to east while Venus rotates from east to west.
Venus’ thick clouds also trap a lot of heat, making temperatures on Venus reach as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit. As far as we know, there is no liquid water on Venus. There may have been some, but it has all evaporated. There is some water vapor in the clouds mixed with sulfur dioxide, which makes sulfuric acid. This is poisonous to us. There is also a lot of carbon dioxide. This thick atmosphere is very heavy, making the air pressure there 90 times greater than on Earth.
Some probes have tried to land on Venus but the pressure is too great, and they only last a couple of hours.
