Giant Mystery Wave Spotted in Atmosphere of Venus

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

So its so hostile you cant even send another orbiter to do what science is supposed to be all about, do things right,

And you expect humans to ever get out there ???

How is it that everything to do with space is completely and totally unverifiable by even the people running the tests ??

a reply to: ParasuvO
Are you talking about Venus, or just the Solar System in general?

Getting to Venus has always been more difficult, due to the high velocities involved so close to the Sun. But it's been orbited and studied, and even landed on, nevertheless.

Vega 1, Vega 2.

a reply to: wildespace

Oh, I know that.

I was just pointing out that there may very well be a larger planet out beyond the orbit of Pluto; it's existence was inferred by the location from whence Oort cloud comets originated and the fact that they should not have been grouped together as much as they are. This lead to looking closer at the orbits of the outer planets and it was found that small perturbations in their orbits would be explained by such a theoretical planet.

I'm all with you on this wave being a local phenomenon and as being a result of the sun.

a reply to: ParasuvO

Space is big. VERY big.

Planets are small compared to space. VERY small.

Now, we (humans) can predict where Venus will be, and when it's suppose to be there when we want to do an orbital insertion.

However, there are so many things that can go wrong, it's not funny.

Fire your engines too soon, too late, too long, too short, and you're not going to be where you need to be when you need to be there.
Or: do all the above right, but damn, something went wrong and that engine didn't deliver the thrust needed, or delivered too much thrust, even after all your testing and safeguards, something went wrong.

Now you also have flight time. It's not hours, and unlike going to the Moon, it won't be days or weeks. It will be months (or, worse going to the far outer planets it will be years and years). Your spacecraft will be exposed to all sorts of things.
And while we can again, try to build a craft that is hardened and durable, things simply can and will go wrong. It maybe something defect that was not detected......or a piece of debris the size of a grain of sand, hitting your craft at planetary velocities.

Unmanned probes tend to be cheaper, smaller and of course, unmanned. Manned spacecraft are bigger simply to just house the life support needed for the people on board. However, it can also carry a surplus of fuel, and with people onboard, make changes needed right away as needed, and not limited to light speed communications, which can be a delay of many minutes to hours of time delay.

So both have pros and cons, and both have things that make it easier or harder.

Space travel has always been harder. Our technology has gotten better in many aspects, but we are still limited by many things. Propulsion systems are still very limited for now to mostly chemical engines. There are other systems that show much promise, but are still far from being a viable system that we could use in just a year or two.

It's also expensive. VERY expensive. Would be nice if we could do it all for free. If all that technology was free. Parts and resources were free. Research and Development were free.

But they're not. They are damn expensive. A unmanned probe could cost anywhere from 10's of millions of dollars up to a billion or more.

And you want to send 2 of them just to verify things?

Okay, I can understand the idea behind it. But many of the probes sent out barely got funding for just one of them. You have the money for the second one? If so, and you're willing to give it up, there are several space agencies that would love to talk to you.

originally posted by: MatterOfPerspective
a reply to: jadedANDcynical

Yep, that's pretty much what happened:

It went sailing off into deep space for 5 years and all it took was 20 minutes of control thruster to bring it back into Venus' orbit?

Is this like when Darth Vader's Tie fighter spun out of control, sailing off into deep space but he managed to regain control of it, using the Force?

Well, "sailing off into deep space" doesn't mean interstellar or intergalactic space. It's not as if it escaped the solar system. It was still in orbit around the sun. Probably in an orbit similar to Venus' orbit. I'm guessing they just had to wait 5 years for the probe to be near enough to venus to try again. Go read all the articles about it and these questions will probably be answered, i cant be bothered with it right now. Good luck

T ome, this looks like a spinning horizontal vortex, produced by wind directed upwards by the terrain / mountains and interacting with the global easterly "super-rotation" of the atmosphere.

Large images straight from the Japanese source: www.isas.jaxa.jp...



I Google-translated that article, and it's quite informative:

Comparing the position of Venus' topography with the position of the arcuate structure, the Aphrodite continent, which reaches an altitude of approximately 5 km, was located just under the center of the arcuate pattern (Figure 2). In order to investigate the cause of arcuate structure obtained by observation, we performed numerical simulation of simple Venusian atmosphere and investigated under what condition arcuate structure occurs. In the simulation, when simulating the influence of this terrain and giving a local barometric change to the lower atmosphere with an altitude of 10 km, it propagates to the sky as a wave called a "gravity wave", and when reaching an altitude of 65 km, a bow It was shown to spread to shape (Figure 3). In other words, it has been shown that atmospheric pressure changes in a limited area of ​​the lower atmosphere propagate through the atmosphere, eventually creating a huge arcuate structure.

So there's a new word I learned today - "arcuate" - shaped like a bow; curved.