"VENUS' CLIMATE IS TELLING US THAT WE REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND THE EARTH"

The Observer, 9 April 2006

Venus: the hot spot

This week a European spacecraft will arrive for a date with Venus, our closest
planetary neighbour. Scientists hope the mission, made on a shoestring budget,
will reveal vital lessons on how unchecked greenhouse gases can turn a world
into a blistering Hades. Robin McKie reports on a journey to the Forgotten
Planet

On Tuesday morning, mission controllers in the European Space Agency's
operations centre in Darmstadt will put the finishing touches to an
international bid to study the ultimate neighbour from hell.

They will transmit a series of radio commands to a robot spacecraft currently
hurtling towards the Sun. Its rocket engine will fire for 50 minutes as it
passes Venus, slowing the craft down so that it can be captured by the planet's
gravitational field. Once in orbit, the wardrobe-sized probe - Venus Express -
will then study the planet's acid clouds, searing heat, crushingly dense
atmosphere and hurricanes to find out why Earth's nearest neighbour has become a
place of insufferable heat and poison.

'Venus is very like Earth in that it is the same size and has an orbit round the
Sun close to ours,' said David Southwood, head of science at the ESA. 'Yet Venus
went wrong. We did not. We want to find out why Venus became our evil twin.'

Venus and Earth are almost identical in size. In addition, both orbit the Sun in
'the Goldilocks zone', a swath of space in which conditions are considered by
astronomers as being not too hot and not too cold to prevent the evolution of
life. Venus should make ideal planetary real estate, in other words. Yet it is
the solar system's most inhospitable planet.

'It's very disturbing that we do not understand the climate on a planet that is
so much like the Earth,' said Professor Fred Taylor, a planetary scientist based
at Oxford University and one of the ESA's chief advisers for the Venus Express
mission. 'It is telling us that we really don't understand the Earth. We have
ended up with a lot of mysteries.'

Full article here:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1750001,00.html

Drama in mission control

ESAPod goes to the heart of Venus Express and meets with a veteran ESA
operations engineer in the mission control centre. The large, well-equipped Main
Control Room enables flight controllers to work as a focussed team during
critical events and gives them the central facilities they need to communicate
with support teams worldwide.

Listen to this ESAPodcast at:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESApod/SEMCVLNFGLE_0.html

ESA’s Venus Express to reach final destination

It was on 9 November last year that ESA's Venus Express spacecraft lifted off
from the desert of Kazakhstan onboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket. Now, after having
travelled 400 million kilometres in only about five months, the spacecraft is
about to reach its final destination. The rendezvous is due to take place on 11
April.

Full story :

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM0UGNFGLE_index_0.html