What does the surface of Venus look like? People have always been curious about this question. Although Venus is a rocky planet like Earth, due to the extremely thick atmosphere of Venus, various gases such as carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide completely cover the sky of Venus, resulting in the surface of Venus being unable to be seen.
Earlier, the United States and the Soviet Union and other countries have launched a number of probes to Venus, and even probes have landed on the surface of Venus, but have not sent back photos of the surface of Venus, so even scientists have not seen what the surface of Venus looks like, but NASA released a message on February 9 this year that the Parker Solar Probe has detected images of the surface of Venus and taken a rare "spectacle" inside Venus.
The wide-area imager used by the Parker Solar Probe can receive thermal signals coming back from inside Venus and image them in the type of light we can all see, which allows it to capture the surface night below the clouds after Venus, starting with the black-and-white GIF:
Look again at the color pattern of the surface of Venus represented by visible light:
In the color map, the equatorial part of Venus has a reddish surface, similar to the color of red copper, and the northern and southern hemispheres are more than the blue-green surface, which looks like the oceans and lakes on the earth, but in fact, there is no liquid water on the surface of Venus, because the surface temperature is as high as 460 ° C, and liquid water cannot exist.
What is more bizarre is that the Parker probe also found that there is a very bright thing inside Venus, that is, the white dot that appears in the GIF, the light is much higher than the background color, NASA experts call the glowing object like "the hot iron that has just been taken out of the forge", speculating that its area is quite large, so what is it? Could it be the searchlight of the Venusians? In fact, experts believe that it is a huge rock on Mars, because the temperature on the surface of Venus is too high, causing the surface of the rock to appear to glow due to the high temperature, but there are other theories, such as some people think that it is actually a volcano.
NASA scientists based on the image data taken by the Parker Solar Probe to get the general situation of the surface of Venus, that its surface is also like the earth there are mountains, plains, plateaus, etc., of which the dark black part is mostly plateaus and mountains, bright places are plains and depressions, because the highland part of the temperature is relatively low, will be displayed as a darker color on the heat map, but in order to obtain more accurate surface data, it is also necessary to have high-precision remote sensing and infrared technology satellites for detection.
The Parker Solar Probe was actually developed primarily for the purpose of detecting the Sun, so why could it detect Venus? Because it is in the process of gradually leaning towards the sun, in the apogee will pass near Venus, and the use of Venus's "gravitational slingshot" effect to gradually reduce the orbit towards the sun, so it can be very close to Venus, then you can also use its own detection equipment to detect Venus, in fact, NASA released the image data on the surface of Venus taken around February 20, 2021, but the processing and analysis of image data needs to take a lot of time, so the news release time is relatively lagging.
In the eight planets of the solar system, in fact, Venus is the closest planet to the earth and the most similar to the earth, it is only 38 million kilometers away from the earth, its volume is close to 90% of the earth, and the mass is equivalent to 80% of the earth, but the surface environment of this planet is very harsh, the temperature is as high as 460 ° C, and the temperature difference of the entire planet is extremely small, the surface atmospheric pressure is as high as 96 times the atmospheric pressure on the earth's surface, which is 5 to 15 times larger than the air pressure inside the tires of the big truck. It is equivalent to the water pressure at 900 meters of the Earth's ocean, and the hot wind above is relatively violent, and sometimes the air will be sprinkled with sulfuric acid rain, so it is generally believed that there is no life on Venus.
However, some scientists believe that at an altitude of 50 to 80 kilometers above the atmosphere of Venus, at an atmospheric height similar to the atmospheric pressure on the earth's surface, the atmosphere and temperature environment and the earth's surface environment are similar, so it may be possible to build a floating base there, and humans may be able to build scientific research stations there for scientific research activities.
Resources:
Global Network February 10 article "NASA says it took the first photo of the surface of Venus, and also saw visible light, from the Parker Solar Probe."
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