Posted on 11/26/2011 8:07:24 PM PST by SunkenCiv
...the planet's surface... a smoldering 470° Celsius... shows signs of recent geological activity, with hot spots resembling those beneath Hawaii... appears to be insulated by one large, solid lid... Some regions in the southern hemisphere... are emitting more heat than others... appear to be younger... with basaltic lava flows... at least nine volcanic hot spots, or mantle plumes.. between 250,000 and 2.5 million years old... Though alternative explanations for the Venusian veneer point toward cataclysmic processes, Svedhem says the data support gradual resurfacing... a thin layer of ozone on Venus' nightside... only one-thousandth the amount on Earth... the presence of Earthlike lightning in the Venusian clouds remains disputed... the Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft... failed during orbit insertion... with a second attempted rendezvous planned for 2015... If Akatsuki does enter Venus orbit, it will begin imaging the Venusian clouds... At the... poles, that shroud's height shrinks to 65 kilometers... embellished by mysterious vortices... swirl around a central 2- to 3-kilometer-wide hole, a tunnel that plunges through the atmosphere. And they look like Earth's hurricanes, except that they are about the size of Europe, says Dmitry Titov of the European Space Agency and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research... the vortices appear to be the result of a global pattern of atmospheric circulation known as "superrotation." The clouds on Venus fly around the planet at speeds up to 150 meters per second, completing a round trip in just four Earth days, even though a single Venusian day lasts for 243 Earth days... While a number of plausible scenarios have been developed to describe Earth's atmospheric circulation, they all "fail completely" when applied to Venus, Svedhem says... Sometime in mid-2015, the spacecraft will fall into the toxic clouds.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
One small picture and an entire planet is gay. And I’m weird...teehee...
lol......i'm so shallow. and lame. :P
Yeah, I’m lesbian trapped in a man’s body.
I wondered about the tiaras, but was too polite to ask.
I’ve been trying to get in touch with my feminine side, turns out she’s a real bitch, so...
...I have a policy of never hitting a woman, but a bit** I’ll knock flat on her a** so... :-))
I apologize for my last remark to you...
No harm done, I haven’t got that far into the comments (nice job, btw, everyone, considering FR was running so slow last night), and I’m going to bed now. :’) And regardless of whether I wind up reading it eventually, I gladly accept your apology! :’)
You really are getting in touch with your masculine side.
thanks for the chuckle.....GG
Trust me...teehee...
Every chance I get. Wait, did I say that out loud?
Yeah but I still think we should have made sure the flag was on the moon when we went to Mars.
Chaz??!!!?
Very interesting link!
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