Fact File
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Venus is the second planet in our solar system.
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Venus is called Earth’s sister; they are the same in many ways.
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Venus’s diameter is 12 1000 km that is only 1 000 kilometres smaller than Earth.
At its closest, Venus is 41 840 000 km away.
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Almost all of Venus is covered in Lava.
The atmosphere of Venus made up mainly of carbon dioxide.
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The clouds on Venus are made of acid.
The tallest mountain on Venus is called Maxwell Montes it is more than 11 km high.
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It is hotter on Venus than it is on earth.
Its size is slightly smaller than Earth.
It also features gravity similar to that of Earth.
Venus is surrounded by clouds consisting of mercury, ferric chloride hydrocarbons and sulphuric acid. These clouds create
the most corrosive acid rain found anywhere in our solar system.
The clouds are so thick that little light even reaches the surface. The light that does reach the surface is converted to heat
and cannot escape the atmosphere making Venus the hottest planet at around 500 Degrees Celsius.
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The surface of Venus is often described as a "stormy desert" full of many craters and very active volcanoes.
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The surface of Venus is also likened to molten lead.
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Venus features no liquid water.
After the Sun and Moon, Venus is the brightest object in the sky. Because its thick clouds reflect most of the light Venus
gets from the Sun, the planet looks like a very bright star in the morning or evening sky.
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In Roman mythology, Venus was identified with the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite.
To the ancient Mayans, Venus was the patron planet of warfare called Kukulcan, or the feathered serpent.
Fact File
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Earth and Venus have very similar size and mass, and they orbit the Sun close to the Sun in very similar orbits. The size of
Venus is only 650 km less than the size of Earth and the mass of Venus is 81.5% the mass of the Earth.
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Venus rotates very slowly. While a day on Earth takes just 24 hours to complete, a day on Venus is 243 of our Earth days.
Even stranger, Venus rotates backwards compared to all the other planets in the Solar System. If you could fly up above the
Solar System and then look down at the planets, all of them are turning in a counter-clockwise direction. Except Venus. It’s
rotating in a clockwise direction.
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The mass of the atmosphere is 93 times that of the Earth’s atmosphere. If you could stand on the surface of Venus, you
would experience 92 times the pressure you have on Earth. This is the same as going nearly a kilometer underneath the
surface of the ocean.
During the height of the space race, the Soviet Union launched a series of Venera spacecraft to attempt landings on the
surface of Venus. But they underestimated just how nasty the atmosphere can be.
Until the Americans and Soviets sent their first spacecraft to study Venus up close, nobody really knew what was down under
the planet’s thick clouds. Science fiction writers dreamed up lush tropical jungles. The hellish temperatures and dense
atmospheres surprised everyone.
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Unlike the Earth, Venus has no moons. Mars has moons, and even Pluto has moons. But Venus… no moons.
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Although Venus just looks like a really bright star in the sky, if you can see it with a telescope, you’ll see something much
different. When looking through a telescope, you can see that Venus goes through phases, like the Moon. When Venus is
closest, at its brightest, it actually makes a thin crescent. And then, when Venus is dimmest and furthest away, you see more
of a circle.
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While the surface of Mercury, Mars and the Moon are pounded with impact craters, the surface of Venus has relatively few
craters. Planetary scientists estimate that the surface of Venus is only half a billion years old. The constant volcanism
reshapes the surface, covering over any impact craters regularly.
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Many spacecraft have traveled to Venus, but one of the most sophisticated is there right now: Venus Express. The mission
was sent by the European Space Agency, and arrived at Venus on April 11, 2006. It will perform a detailed study of the
Venusian atmosphere and clouds and will map the planet’s plasma environment and its surface.
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Probes that have landed on Venus have not survived more than a few hours before being destroyed by the incredibly high
temperatures.
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It is thought that the planet was completely resurfaced by volcanic activity 300 million to 500 million years ago.
Venus has two large highland areas: Ishtar Terra, about the size of Australia, in the north polar region, and Aphrodite Terra,
about the size of South America, straddling the equator and extending for almost 10 000 km.
In the early days of Venus' 4 billion year long life, it would have appeared very similar to the Earth. The two would have been
almost identical. However, over a period of a few million years, forces on Venus caused it to take a very different course than
the Earth.
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Venus lies much closer to the Sun than does our planet. That single fact has caused an unstoppable chain of events that
doomed Venus to its fiery existence. Owing to its closer proximity to the Sun, Venus' temperature should have been only
slightly warmer than that of the Earth. But as the planet warmed, the water evaporated. This increase in water vapor in the
atmosphere began a cycle of global warming that could not be stopped. Water vapor is a very effective greenhouse gas.
(Greenhouse gas soaks up hot air and prevents it from escaping into space). The increase in water vapor caused the
temperature to rise further, which caused more water to evaporate, causing the temperature to climb still further.