For nearly 10 years, there’s been only one spacecraft able to keep its cool above the hellish landscape of Venus. The Japanese Akatsuki probe was sent to Earth’s neighboring planet to observe its atmospheric dynamics, but the lone Venusian mission has suddenly gone quiet.
Around 4.5 billion years ago, Earth and Venus were born in the midst of a chaotic star system. With the neighboring worlds being of the same size and similar structure, it’s believed that both planets likely began with similar amounts of water. Today, however, Venus is a hellish world with intense heat and crushing…
The EnVision mission to Venus was officially adopted by the European Space Agency on Thursday, which means the organization has committed to getting the spacecraft Venus-bound by the early 2030s.
While air is a gaseous delight unique to Earth, a team of astrophysicists have made a satisfying discovery: the direct observation of atomic oxygen on Venus’ dayside, confirming that the element crucial for our existence exists on both sides of the hellish planet.
To all the space probes we’ve loved before: sorry! You fell into Saturn, drifted into deep space, suffocated in Martian dust—all for the greater good of science. Today, we’re memorializing the space explorers that met dramatic endings far, far from Earth.
It’s been 30 years since a NASA spacecraft went to Venus, a yellowish planet 67 million miles from the Sun and 141 million miles from us. Venus is often thought of as a sibling planet to Earth, both being rocky worlds close enough to the Sun to bask in its heat. And yet, at some point in their histories, the two…
A team of engineers studying the 500-year-old, backward writings of Leonardo da Vinci have found evidence that the Italian polymath was working out gravity a century before its foundations were established by Galileo Galilei.
