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posted by janrinok on Monday August 15 2016, @08:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the ...by-us dept.

In a paper (PDF of full article) which has been accepted for Geophysical Research Letters, NASA researchers

created a suite of 3-dimensional climate simulations using topographic data from the Magellan mission, solar spectral irradiance estimates for 2.9 and 0.715 billion years ago, present-day Venus orbital parameters, an ocean volume consistent with current theory and measurements, and an atmospheric composition estimated for early Venus.

According to the output of the general circulation model, "Venus may have had a climate with liquid water on its surface for approximately 2 billion years." In the simulation, extensive, highly reflective, H2O clouds formed on the lit side of the planet. "A strong day-night circulation" carried heat to the dark side. These factors limited the range of temperatures, in spite of a slow rotation rate. The authors note that liquid water can be not only a sign of habitability, but a cause of it:

[...] while the possibility of surface liquid water defines the traditional habitable zone, our results suggest that a planet with a modest amount of surface liquid water is more conducive to habitability over a wide range of stellar fluxes than a planet largely or completely covered by water. The inner edge should therefore be considered a transition region in which the probability of habitability gradually decreases inward rather than a strict boundary separating completely different regimes.

Venus today has little water. The high ratio of deuterium to protium (as compared to the ratio in Earth's surface water) leads us to believe that large most of the planet's hydrogen has escaped to space.

in the popular press:


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  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday August 16 2016, @12:10PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Tuesday August 16 2016, @12:10PM (#388648)

    I'm curious if we could turn Venus back(?) into a habitable planet by removing a huge amount of the carbon from the atmosphere. The result would be lots of O2 in the atmosphere and with some hydrogen that O2 becomes water. Alternatively, we could remove the CO2 completely by slingshotting it Mars in frozen pellet form in order to give Mars a thicker atmosphere that plants could use to grow.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 16 2016, @12:44PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 16 2016, @12:44PM (#388658)

    Grow weed on Mars converting CO2 to O2, then ship the weed to Mars where its legal. There are some minor scalability aspects to this problem.

    Somewhat more seriously carbon monoxide is not the best rocket fuel by any means but it does work and is pretty easy to make out of CO2. Maybe decades or centuries after the Earth has a space elevator they'll get around to making one on Venus, and pump CO2 into an orbital carbon monoxide plant. Well technically I guess most ways of making CO will involve a pile of O2 as waste which makes a nice oxidizer so you've got integrated single site production of a not-totally awful fuel. Less than 300 seconds Isp but not the worst fuel imaginable. The trick is can you build a Venus orbiting fuel factory without tech that makes chemical rockets obsolete...

    Given a supply of hydrogen, Venus orbital near a space elevator would be an interesting place for a chemistry plant. An infinite supply of C and O beneath you and more solar power than you get at Earth. If all goes well etc Venus orbital could be very economically active with transport ships hauling in H2 and metal asteroids from mining the rings of Saturn or whatever.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday August 16 2016, @04:25PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 16 2016, @04:25PM (#388709)

    We'll just send a handful of Kudzu and Dandelion seeds. Given the amount of sun, that should do the job in a couple years.
    Not sure there will be room left to land afterwards, though.