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http://www.businessinsider.com/venus-de … ns-2016-12
Quote:
GEER pulls together everything researchers have learned to date about surface conditions on Venus into an 800-liter chamber. A mixing machine combines the known gases on Venus and a powerful heater warms them up.
"It takes two-and-a-half days to warm up and five days to cool down," Leah Nakley, GEER's lead engineer, told Business Insider.
Costa says one thing he's come to understand by working with GEER is just how strange the atmosphere of Venus is at the planet's surface.
"It's a supercritical fluid mixture, not just a gas," Costa said.
Supercritical fluids behave like a gas and a liquid at the same time. If you drink decaffeinated coffee, you benefit from them: supercritical carbon dioxide is typically washed over coffee beans to penetrate deep inside them and dissolve away most of their caffeine.A metal wire exposed to Venus-like conditions inside of NASA's GEER chamber. GEER/NASA Glenn Research Center; Business Insider
This same thing can happen with metals and electronics, though, which is not a good thing for spacecraft.
Normally rust-proof steel alloys dissolve, leaching out metals to form black fans of minerals, like some Gothic version of a crystal-growing kit.
Costa says walking around the surface of Venus would feel like walking through air that's as thick as a pool of water, at a pressure equivalent to being 100 meters (328 feet) underwater, and deadly hot.
A "breeze" of a few miles per hour would feel more like a gentle wave pushing you around at shore.
"It's difficult to imagine this. I guess it'd be like sticking yourself inside a pressure cooker," he said.
But the atmosphere of Venus also has trace amounts hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfuric acid, which are all extremely dangerous chemicals.
"Instead of having water vapor clouds, Venus has sulfuric acid clouds," he said. "And you have to go through those to even get to the surface. That is terrifying."
I am glad they are doing this work. Perhaps some more enduring exploration probes can be designed. Perhaps those can find evidence of the previous Venus environments. Perhaps some day as well there will be a way to mine the surface of Venus.
Last edited by Void (2016-12-09 09:52:47)
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