NASA wants to take a mission to the atmosphere of Venus- with airships and a "cloud city"
62 replies, posted
[QUOTE=ironman17;46760541]Yeah the Venusian surface is pretty shitty. Not only is it the high pressure, searing heat and acid rain, but due to the fact that it barely even has a magnetic field AND it has real shitty rotation to the point where the DAYS on Venus are longer than the years. Even if we could technically fix the acid rain with an exorbitant dispersion of alkaline substances across the entire planet (the Belt would supply, but it'd be damned expensive), possibly fixing the pressure problem in the process, Venus would still be baked on one side and frozen on the other, and it would take thousands of years for us to develop the kind of technology required to get the planet spinning properly for far shorter days.
Also, any life on that cooler Venus would need to always be mobile, even the plant-life, always staying in that ever-moving safe-zone between the searing day and the freezing night.[/QUOTE]
When you said mobile plants, is it bad if I thought of genetically-engineered plant-animal hybrids?
[editline]20th December 2014[/editline]
[QUOTE=LoneWolf_Recon;46760678]I would imagine mining operations to be rather simple too, instead of dropping personnel down to the surface you simply need to drop down the drill/pump (If molten) and pipe it back up to the outpost.
Much less risky.[/QUOTE]
Wouldn't work. We don't have the materials needed to put anything on the surface for any significant period of time. The Russians managed a whole ten minutes before their probe was corroded to nothing, and we haven't done a lot of work in that niche of materials sciences since 1975.
Again, Venus isn't useful to us for its minerals. It would need to be terraformed to some extent for that to be within the realm of possibility. Venus could be useful for its gasses, however, since most of our rocket technology is based on compressed hydrogen and oxygen, two of the most abundant gasses in its atmosphere.
Think Bespin rather than Mustafar.
[QUOTE=LoneWolf_Recon;46760678]I would imagine mining operations to be rather simple too, instead of dropping personnel down to the surface you simply need to drop down the drill/pump (If molten) and pipe it back up to the outpost.
Much less risky.[/QUOTE]
That would be one hell of a long pipe.
Wheres that FP'er who hypothesized his in the mars thread... I guess he got the last laugh of that
edit: right below me smh
MAN I KNOW MY SHIT
[url]http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1442179[/url]
this was only a few days ago, I talked about the physics behind it, and some guy debated that it couldn't be done.
[QUOTE=Code3Response;46760867]Wheres that FP'er who hypothesized his in the mars thread... I guess he got the last laugh of that[/QUOTE]
<3
There's also been a few ideas kicked around to do the same thing in the atmosphere of Saturn, but thats wayyyy colder and its hella windy (even though you would eventually equilibriate with the surrounding air and just drift WITH the fast wind, zones where currents collide would be so hella no bueno)
modesty aside, I'm a second year college student heavily conflicted over my major. I am taking this as a sign to go into astrophysics or aerospace engineering or whatever. This is a good a sign as any.
[QUOTE=Nebukadnezzer;46760883]modesty aside, I'm a second year college student heavily conflicted over my major. I am taking this as a sign to go into astrophysics or whatever.[/QUOTE]
Astrophysics seems fun, I'm still kinda thinking about my choice. problem with astrophysics is that you might end up teaching somewhere which, while it can be fun, is kind of a dead end in terms of a career. If you go Aero and Astro engineering (assuming your uni has course that let you specialize in more space-focused stuff, thank god my uni does), you have more opportunities for advancement and more hands-on engineering opportunities.
Being an astrophysicist with a doctoral degree though can leave you the option of heading up a research lab on projects like this, but the same can be done with a Masters or Doctorate in Engineering.
Its all your choice though, I'm just a fuckin college freshman who barely passed this quarter what the hell do I know
[editline]20th December 2014[/editline]
oh oh OH! internships. NASA has loads of 'em. At JPL and Langley too, go for one. No harm in applying, right?
[editline]20th December 2014[/editline]
also if you do well enough you can get "partner" status meaning you are guaranteed a job after you graduate either with one of NASA's subcontractors or NASA itself
the greenscreen parts at the end are the best part
[QUOTE=woolio1;46760733]When you said mobile plants, is it bad if I thought of genetically-engineered plant-animal hybrids?
[editline]20th December 2014[/editline]
[highlight]Wouldn't work. [/highlight]We don't have the materials needed to put anything on the surface for any significant period of time. The Russians managed a whole ten minutes before their probe was corroded to nothing, and we haven't done a lot of work in that niche of materials sciences since 1975.
Again, Venus isn't useful to us for its minerals. It would need to be terraformed to some extent for that to be within the realm of possibility. Venus could be useful for its gasses, however, since most of our rocket technology is based on compressed hydrogen and oxygen, two of the most abundant gasses in its atmosphere.
Think Bespin rather than Mustafar.[/QUOTE]
Dohohoho! Technically not true. According to this graph, the height of the blimps and any habitation will be about 50km above the surface.
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Venusatmosphere.svg/300px-Venusatmosphere.svg.png[/img]
And according to this measure of specific strengths, which calculates the height of a vertical column, supported at the top, of a material before it can no longer support its own weight, [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_strength[/url] , you could, in theory, make a cable out of spider silk that could support a drill the weight of the cable itself. However that's retarded it'd just be made of a hollow cord of carbon nanotubes since they're conductive.
Of course, you'd need an absolutely massive air platform to support it, since you must hold the weight of the drill, cable, and ore by buoyant forces alone. You also need something to hold it. By the time you get a bubble of gas that large, you might as well just stick some people inside of it and make it a city. Then think about storage, might as well just process the ore there and dump the normal rocks out, so you don't have to send a huge amount of material to escape velocity.
[QUOTE=woolio1;46760733]When you said mobile plants, is it bad if I thought of genetically-engineered plant-animal hybrids?[/QUOTE]
Something like that, but also something along the line of triffids. Not quite "hybrids" in the conventional sense, more like plants that are engineered to have the quality of locomotion in addition to their regular ability to photosynthesise. However locomotion requires oxygen and chemical energy, so such creatures would need to remain stationary for a while to stay in their regular photosynthetic form without exhausting their supply nutrients, but not so long that they would get caught outside of the safety of the Venusian twilight. Hence why they would need to be mobile, as otherwise they would shrivel up and die in the post-dawn heat.
In addition, considering their nature as mobile plants, in that there would be nothing else to break up the ground into anything that passes for soil on that forsaken ball of rock, they would require other means with which to acquire nutrients from the nomadic ecosystem. One solution would be making them like the triffids, as in they kill prey and draw up nutrients from their corpses, though another would be for them to break up rocks with potent digestive acids and reabsorb the ghastly mix to extract what minerals they can from the terrain.
How are they going to keep the blimp filled?
[QUOTE=Cmx;46761055]How are they going to keep the blimp filled?[/QUOTE]
its unlikely to leak very much. There wouldn't be a lot of situations causing air to leak very much in the first palce, and regular air can be compressed pretty well
[QUOTE=JohnFisher89;46760275]Can we just go to mars first?[/QUOTE]
At their closest, Venus is closer.
Probably the best way of making Venus actually habitable is getting rid of its massively dense CO2 atmoshpere. Probably the best way to do this is by crashing an asteroid into it which would cause most of the atmosphere to be blown off the planet. Or we get giant vacuum cleaners on these flying cities and just suck the air out.
People have speculated about this kind of thing for a while. There is a specific layer in Venus' upper atmosphere with temperature and pressure very close to Earth's. You'd still need environment suits, but they wouldn't have to be pressurized and would be much easier to work in.
There are some other advantages. I think the delta-v requirements to travel to Venus are a bit lower than Mars, and the transit time is more reasonable. There were rough plans back in the 70s to send an Apollo-derived mission to orbit Venus. The possibility of picking up more data about aerocapture is exciting, too.
But, there are problems. Venus has about the same mass as Earth, so it takes a lot of delta-v to return to orbit compared to Mars. The advantage from launching at 50km altitude is pretty much negligible. Achieving orbit is about velocity, not altitude. That's an awfully big return vehicle you have to lug down with you. The atmosphere at that altitude can be turbulent at times, which will beat up on your hardware. There's no atmospheric water to skim off and use. It rains sulphuric acid. Any failure in the lifting system means everybody dies horribly, though I'm not sure whether they'd be crushed first or roasted alive first.
My biggest question is: Is the science worth it? Venus is kind of a garbage planet. It doesn't get as much interest as Mars because it's the most hostile environment to Earth life in the solar system. What productive information can really be gained having people float around in the upper atmosphere that can't be done with unmanned balloons and orbiters? There is compelling scientific reason to put boots on Mars: it lets you do geological ground work much more effectively than a rover. I don't see the same thing in putting a manned balloon around Venus.
Not to mention that Venus has to contend with Solar radiation much more often than Mars (Inverse Square Law)
[QUOTE=woolio1;46760733]When you said mobile plants, is it bad if I thought of genetically-engineered plant-animal hybrids?
[editline]20th December 2014[/editline]
Wouldn't work. We don't have the materials needed to put anything on the surface for any significant period of time. The Russians managed a whole ten minutes before their probe was corroded to nothing, and we haven't done a lot of work in that niche of materials sciences since 1975.
Again, Venus isn't useful to us for its minerals. It would need to be terraformed to some extent for that to be within the realm of possibility. Venus could be useful for its gasses, however, since most of our rocket technology is based on compressed hydrogen and oxygen, two of the most abundant gasses in its atmosphere.
Think Bespin rather than Mustafar.[/QUOTE]
Good analogy, and thanks for the reminder. The Russians had it bad with those missions and given the temperature, even chemically inert materials like polyethylene/kalrez/etc would simply melt. [URL="http://www.parrinst.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/07/Parr_Titanium-Corrosion-Info.pdf"]Titanium[/URL] may have a chance though. (pg. 22)
[QUOTE=Deathtrooper2;46761556]Probably the best way of making Venus actually habitable is getting rid of its massively dense CO2 atmoshpere. Probably the best way to do this is by crashing an asteroid into it which would cause most of the atmosphere to be blown off the planet. Or we get giant vacuum cleaners on these flying cities and just suck the air out.[/QUOTE]
it's atmosphere is 93 times more massive than earth's. It's not going to be easy to get rid of. It's 1/16 the density of water at the surface.
[QUOTE=JohnFisher89;46760584]Venus is only a possibility for mining since it is [B]incredibly easy to gather rare earth metals from it[/B]. Mars does not have the luxury of said metals, even though it is easier to move around due to the gravity and non flammable gasses. The floating fortress idea works because basic Hydrogen will float easily on venus due to it's highly dense atmosphere; but the return on investment until we can effectively mine those resources is basically nill.[/QUOTE]
Could you elaborate on that bit. AFAIK Venus' atmosphere is basically sulfuric acid, it has a pressure of ~92(?) atm at the surface, and on top of that is really hot. That doesn't sound one bit easy.
[editline]21st December 2014[/editline]
[QUOTE=Zeke129;46761528]At their closest, Venus is closer.[/QUOTE]
That doesn't make that big of a difference. Venus is ~barely~ closer. And if you're already going through all that effort, it's not too much work to go a bit further. It would be like driving from Los Angeles to the Empire State building, but deciding that the Chrysler building was just a little too far.
For everyone that wants to mine thing from Venus: Why bother with huge gravity well and air resistance when you have somewhere in space that is free from both of them, like moon or asteroids?
[QUOTE=Nebukadnezzer;46761016]Dohohoho! Technically not true. According to this graph, the height of the blimps and any habitation will be about 50km above the surface.
[/QUOTE]
After some thought: Didn't take into account the fact that Venus's surface gravity is also only 90% that of earth's, so it would be slightly easier. However, countering that, the wind-speeds 50km up are several hundreds of miles an hour compared to the surface, and this would be hitting a massive surface area relative to the station's inertia. So this is probably not the plan. Adding to that, space elevators are difficult as there is almost no centrifugal force from the rotation to help keep the station up. I'd imagine a mining platform would use a massive kite, given the extremely consistent wind speeds. The forces acting on the tether are magnified considerably by the force of the wind acting on it and the platform, so I do imagine that carbon nanotubes are the only likely material able to support it. A benefit of the massive windspeeds is this kite could output tremendous power with wind turbines.
[QUOTE=Nebukadnezzer;46760870]MAN I KNOW MY SHIT
[url]http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1442179[/url]
this was only a few days ago, I talked about the physics behind it, and some guy debated that it couldn't be done.
[/QUOTE]
I never said it couldn't be done, I said it would be challenging.
This isn't a plan, it's a [I]concept.[/I]
[QUOTE=Nebukadnezzer;46765121]After some thought: Didn't take into account the fact that Venus's surface gravity is also only 90% that of earth's, so it would be slightly easier. However, countering that, the wind-speeds 50km up are several hundreds of miles an hour compared to the surface, and this would be hitting a massive surface area relative to the station's inertia. So this is probably not the plan. Adding to that, space elevators are difficult as there is almost no centrifugal force from the rotation to help keep the station up. I'd imagine a mining platform would use a massive kite, given the extremely consistent wind speeds. The forces acting on the tether are magnified considerably by the force of the wind acting on it and the platform, so I do imagine that carbon nanotubes are the only likely material able to support it. A benefit of the massive windspeeds is this kite could output tremendous power with wind turbines.[/QUOTE]
If you enter high wind ata constant speed you'll eventually end up equilibrating to the local air currents and should drift with what would feel like a light breeze
When can I do this in kerbal space program?
Oh hey, I looked up the potential habitation of Venus a few weeks ago and it looked promising with the exception of the acidic storms and negligible of cosmic radiation shielding from the magnetosphere.
[QUOTE=paindoc;46765852]If you enter high wind ata constant speed you'll eventually end up equilibrating to the local air currents and should drift with what would feel like a light breeze[/QUOTE]
No, I was talking about a station that is mining. A drill can't just drag across the surface, it's got to drill in one place. Thus the station must be tethered, and stay in one place relative the ground. So it would be very, very windy. Also since it's tethered to the ground, the night will be very long, as venus rotates very very slowly. So it'd probably be wind powered.
[QUOTE=woolio1;46760733]When you said mobile plants, is it bad if I thought of genetically-engineered plant-animal hybrids?
[editline]20th December 2014[/editline]
Wouldn't work. We don't have the materials needed to put anything on the surface for any significant period of time.[B]The Russians managed a whole ten minutes before their probe was corroded to nothing,[/B] and we haven't done a lot of work in that niche of materials sciences since 1975.[/QUOTE]
I believe this is a picture taken by said probe.
Tags are fucking with me so I'll just link it.
[URL]http://www.apod.lunexit.it/gallery/large/d416d2cf5e1efaf2be117438f99f5f93.jpg[/URL]
[QUOTE=Nebukadnezzer;46766376]No, I was talking about a station that is mining. A drill can't just drag across the surface, it's got to drill in one place. Thus the station must be tethered, and stay in one place relative the ground. So it would be very, very windy. Also since it's tethered to the ground, the night will be very long, as venus rotates very very slowly. So it'd probably be wind powered.[/QUOTE]
Venus is worthless for mining. Heavy gravity, thick atmosphere, out of the way (unless you're heading to Mercury) and honestly not much worth taking. If you want to mine space, mine asteroids or moons.
[QUOTE=gman003-main;46766574]Venus is worthless for mining. Heavy gravity, thick atmosphere, out of the way (unless you're heading to Mercury) and honestly not much worth taking. If you want to mine space, mine asteroids or moons.[/QUOTE]
I'm giving a plan for if you wanted to. Wanting to has "Profitable mineral extraction" as a requirement. It's theoretical.
[QUOTE=Bradyns;46760057]How the fuck would they get home?[/QUOTE]
Uber.
Why did we take so long to think of Venus and always focus on Mars?
Also
[QUOTE=Adarrek;46760074]Cloud city you say?
[t]http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121118205219/starwars/images/f/f1/Cloud_City.png[/t]
[highlight](User was banned for this post ("these posts don't contribute to the thread" - Orkel))[/highlight][/QUOTE]
Why was this ban put in place
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