Evidence mounts that Venus has multiple active volcanoes New research on data collected in the 1990s shows that on Venus, volcanoes are likely to be both more active and widespread than scientists previously understood. Evidence of until-now undiscovered volcanic lava flows in two different regions of Venus has been excavated from a treasure trove of old radar data collected by a …
Its amazing how they can dig into 30 year old data sets and turn up something completely new.
Yep. Science is cool like that. Plus the compute power we have now is far greater than we had 30yrs ago, so..
..about 1,200 gigabits of data
Becomes more manageable, and probably a lot cheaper. So I wonder how much of this was a combination of funding + tech, ie ingesting and analysing data would have been a lot more expensive in the past.
Sadly it is all too common. It's hard to get funding for a new space mission but even harder for a review of data already collected. That's the argument for putting everything in the public domain but even that has limitations - if you are a doctoral student you are unlikely to relish the prospect of looking through old data to test a hypothesis that was never envisaged when it was collected, and at the end of three years in all likelihood arriving at a null result.
Nice idea at first glance, but probably most unpleasant for the bloke(s) wearing the boots.
For starters, them wearing boots is quite unlikely. Instead the landing crew will be lugging powerful lights because the immensly thick Venusian cloud layer means it is likely to be rather dark on the surface as well as damn hot, and the lower atmosphere may well resemble a pitch black, hot dust storm. Consequently said intrepid explorer(s) will be wearing something more like a deep sea diving suit than a space suit, and it will be fitted with a heavy duty refrigeration system as well as a set of decent lights.
In reality, any future Venusian explorers are more likely to be driving round in substantial tracked or wheeled refrigerators with good headlights than stomping round Venus in a space suit.
Sadly, the hot, tropical Venusian jungles filled with ravenous prehistoric beasts in 50's SF stories were no more realistic than the contemporary Martian Canals and Martians were.
Woops - got the light level wrong: stupid mistake since I've seen those Russian surface pictures.
However, I wonder how bright it is at the surface: the lack of much shadow in the Venera photos makes it very hard to tell just how bright the light is at the surface and nobody seems to have publishrd the Venera exposure settings.
At least I was right about the Venusian atmosphere being both hot and dense (450C, 50 atmospheres) and is 96% CO2.
Somehow I don't think anybody will bother going there in person, except to claim a Guinness Record or to win a bet.
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