The Supermassive Podcast - 55: Venus aka "Earth's Evil Twin"

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

This is Venus’ moment in the supermassive spotlight. What do we know about this hellish planet? And what missions are going there in the near future?  Izzie and Dr Becky speak with Dr Phillipa Mason from Imperial College London about EnVision, an upcoming mission to Venus, as well as RAS librarian Sian Prosser to explore the archive. Plus Dr Robert Massey is here to take on your questions. The paper about the sounds on Venus can be found here.  The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham. 

Even though it's named after the Roman goddess of love, I wouldn't exactly call Venus lovely. The atmosphere on Venus is like 93 times thicker than on Earth. Sometimes called Earth's evil twig. Hello and welcome to this supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst, and Dr. Becky has a new assistant, I think. We have a new member of the supermassive team here. Yes, we do. We have a 12-week-old kitten with us today. She's lying on the desk in front of me, so if you hear a purr on the microphone

at any point, that's why her name is pip short for pippin short for peregrine toque and she also has like a an official breeder name oh yeah so like the breeder you know gives them like the litter the names and this litter's all began with the letter v and so they said what would you like to call her that begins with the letter v and i said well that's an easy one it's gotta be venus amazing that's so funny you should mention venus becky you might say is because we well we realize we've done a big old tour of the soul system across this podcast but last month the producers that'll be you is realized who was that i wonder we've never actually given the final rocky planets the their own episode whoops so this is venus's moment in the supermassive spotlight both the

kitten and the planet yeah glad i could help i mean i was just waiting for you to get a kitten called venus actually that that was it it was that was my very very good timing so what do we know about this hellish planet of Venus not a hellish kitten thankfully and what missions are going there in the near future so coming up I've been speaking to Dr Philippa Mason from Imperial College London who works on one of the missions that's going to Venus plus I took a nice little trip to Burlington House to meet the Society's librarian, Sian Prosser, to explore what's in the archive about Venus. And as always, Dr. Robert Massey, the Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society is here. So, Robert, let's recap on Venus as a planet because we've covered it in dribs and drabs of other episodes,

but it's not had its time to shine. So what's it like? Well, it's sometimes called Earth's evil twin because it's so similar in size to the Earth and has the same mass, you know, really quite similar under the surface. But otherwise, it's very different. And that's because it's about 30% closer to the Sun. It has, curiously, quite a circular orbit. It gets about twice as much solar radiation as the earth does as a result and with a really thick carbon dioxide atmosphere that means it has a scorching hot surface. It really is about runaway greenhouse effect there and looking at it in the sky from that observing perspective it's also easily the brightest thing you can see. It's so bright you can even see it

during the day and I've done that a few times myself even from the UK. But when you look at it through a telescope you only have very very subtle features so it really did take the space age to find out a lot more about it. Cheers Robert, we'll catch up with you later in the show as well for some more questions and obviously the usual stargazing tips as well. So even though that it's named after the Roman goddess of love I wouldn't exactly call venus lovely it's the hottest planet in our solar system with clouds laced with sulfuric acid and a choking atmosphere delightful exactly let's pack our bags and go um but what else do we know about venus that future missions might investigate further it's a question i put to planetary geologist Dr. Philippa Mason, who's a science investigator on the Envision mission.

The list of things we do know is pretty short compared to the list of things we don't know. So we know lots of generic things like, you know, the size of the planet, its density. It's kind of similar to Earth. It's sort of Earth's nearest neighbour or sister planet, if you like. It's got a thick atmosphere, much thicker than ours, very dense at the surface, 94 times our atmospheric pressure, and very, very hot. It's about 460 degrees at the surface. It'd be like walking around in a superheated, shallow sea. All the things we know about Venus now come from the plethora of missions,

mainly Russian, in the 70s and 80s. Some landed and were able to collect lots of data. That's how we know about the surface pressures. And we know that the surface is mainly made of basalt. It's kind of seemed to be volcanic. And from the Magellan mission, which successfully imaged almost the entire planet in the early 90s. So all of the things we know about the geology and the topography, they come from that mission. which successfully imaged almost the entire planet in the early 90s. So all of the things we know about the geology and the topography, they come from that mission. We do know lots of things, but what those kind of sparse data have done and raised a huge number of questions.

Yes, absolutely. So what are some of those unknowns? For you, what are those standout questions that you want these future missions to understand? My interest is, you know, with the surface geology, change, activity. Venus was assumed to be dead. It's widely accepted that there's no active plate tectonics now, but we don't know that that was always the case. And we don't really have any proof. We know that there are tens of thousands of volcanoes, but how do they work? What drives them? What's the plumbing system in the interior that drives that? We don't know. And we know almost nothing about the Venus interior,

its structure, its makeup. It could be like Earth, it might not be. We don't know how big the core is or what it's made of, whether it's solid or liquid. Venus has no magnetic field. And the reason for that or the impact of it is not really well understood. I want to know how the planet works. I feel sure that it's alive. We now have compelling evidence of activity, modern activity. I don't see how you can have such topographic complexity without an awful lot of deformation. And you can't have deformation without tectonics.

And you certainly can't have volcanoes really without some kind of tectonic activity driving something somewhere so lots of questions there but there are other compelling questions like the climate what sustains this dense atmosphere it must be coupled with the volcanism somehow there's lots of evidence to suggest this there's a lot of sulfur dioxide the volatile content of the atmosphere is really interesting and complex i'm learning all the time so many unknowns i think it's a topic that comes up a lot in science fiction and maybe even um the astronomy in the 50s and 60s before we had missions that it's this this idea that Venus might be suitable for life. It's only fairly recently that we've realised that it's kind of hellish.

So at what point did we know that it wasn't suitable for life as we know it? And was there ever a point that, you know, maybe it was once like Earth? Do we know that? There's the really big invisible elephant in the room. It's water and life. And we have liquid water and we've had it for billions of years, which is why we're alive. And Mars, we now know, was wet, but it's not anymore. So the big question for Venus is, was it ever wet? Is that possible? And so one of the big questions is, what evidence can we collect that helps us to answer that question?

And the composition of the rocks is one clue we have. And so the current missions, the new missions of Ferritas and InVision will both try to answer that question. Back, you know, billions of years ago when the sun was less hot, Venus may well have been in what we call the habitable zone. So did the physics of the atmosphere allow water, if it was present, to condense and ever fall as rain? We don't really know. And when did we know that the conditions were hellish? And that's probably in the 70s when those Russian probes that landed on the surface, they survived long enough to capture a lot of information about the surface temperatures and pressures. And there were also some balloons which recorded information about the surface temperatures and pressures. There were also some balloons which recorded information about atmospheric makeup, so in the 70s.

Okay, and so you work on Envision, which is a very exciting orbiter that is going to be going to Venus. So tell us about the mission and what is it setting out to find? So it has instruments which will look at the atmosphere, instruments to look at the surface. It has an experiment which will look at the atmosphere instruments look at the surface as an experiment which will look at the interior it also has a an amazing long dipole radar antenna which very low wavelength which will penetrate through the rocks this suite of instruments which will collect cross-disciplinary complementary science observations to answer because some of

the questions that i talked about in a kind of holistic way. So that's the premise of InVision. It's a holistic science to look at Venus as a system. The launch window for all of the missions, actually, it turns out to be the end of 2031, so November, December. Because this isn't the only mission that is going to Venus. So tell us about the other plans that are on their way. Yeah, we have a growing fleet. Veritas is the other mission, which is kind of looking at similar things, but its premise is slightly different.

So Veritas is very much a global mapping mission. It has similar instruments. It has a radar. It has an infrared imager. It's going to collect global topography, global imagery. And the difference between it and InVision is InVision is a targeted mission. So it's going for repeated images of certain key areas to detect change. Some observations are global. So the atmospheric data and the infrared data, but the radar, the high resolution imaging, that's being collected in a targeted way. We would love to be able to collect high resolution imagery of the entire planet, but the physical restrictions of the distance and the practicalities of storing and transmitting data mean we can't do that. So you've got this global mission and a targeted mission, and they're really complementary. And then the last one is called Da Vinci, which is an atmospheric

probe. It's really exciting. It's going to descend through the atmosphere and collect a lot of chemical and physical data about the atmosphere. And then when it gets near the surface, it's a funky bit, it's going to turn on a high resolution optical camera. As the thing spins and descends, it's going to take thousands of photographs of the ground, which can be used to reconstruct the topography in a really accurate, precise and detailed way. So for the landing site, we'll have this incredible data set of the physical nature of the terrain. And so one of the other things that the two other missions will do is try to characterize that landing site in its context so that we have as much information as possible about the landing site at all scales. Thank you to Philippa.

So people love talking about volcanism on venus but i personally am fascinated by the clouds so becky can you explain why venus's clouds make it so much easier for us to see with the naked eye yeah i mean it's just because they reflect so much sunlight right they're mainly sulfuric acid like 75 percent sulfuric acid like and above in terms of concentration. So that means they're incredibly opaque as well, kind of like, you know, clouds on Earth are opaque, even though they're water vapor. So they don't let a lot of like visible light down to the surface. And instead, they actually reflect back around about 60 to 70% of the sunlight. So when we talk about how much light planets reflect, that's known as their albedo. That's like the term we give it. So if it's reflecting 70% of the sunlight, then its albedo is 0.7. So it goes from like 0 to

1. So Venus's albedo is about 0.7. For context, like Mars's albedo, 0.1. The gas giant's around 0.5. So this is what makes Venus really bright in the sky. Most of the sunlight that's on it ends up reflecting off it so that we can see it. But it also means that spotting the clouds is also slightly easier, at least when you're out of the Earth's atmosphere. As Robert said before, it's a little bit hard to distinguish because it's so bright, like with a telescope and something like that. But like, you know, like missions to Venus and stuff can really easily pick them out. And maybe with an amateur telescope, you might be able to see some variation but again it's incredibly incredibly bright. Yeah okay and one thing that's caused quite a lot of hype recently is looking for life in those clouds and it's something that listener Space Jamba and quite a few other people on Instagram have asked about too

so what is the latest about those potential signs of life in Venus's clouds? Well we still don't know about life necessarily but the evidence that like triggered signs of life in Venus's clouds? Well, we still don't know about life necessarily, but the evidence that like triggered all this is that there's something known as phosphine in the clouds of Venus. That evidence seems to have held up. So the JCMT Venus Project, which is led by Professor Jane Greaves, who I think we've had on the show before, right? Yeah, well, she came on to actually talk about this

when it was first discovered and the releases of paper. Yeah, Jane is great. I'm so glad we had her on. So, yeah, so their group has shown multiple times now that data from different telescopes and Venus's clouds has this evidence for phosphine, pH 3, you know, in the atmosphere, which on Earth is a biomarker, right? It's produced by bacteria, which is why everyone got so excited, right? Because like, oh, a biomarker that's produced by bacteria on the atmosphere, in the atmosphere of Venus? Like what? That's not something we were expecting. But then at the recent National Astronomy Meeting in July, which happened in Hull this year, another team presented tentative evidence for actually ammonia in the atmosphere, which is NH3, nitrogen and hydrogen together. And, you know, again, ammonia produced by life on Earth.

So I think it's really intriguing, right? Because, I mean, all the signs that you point towards life, but this is Venus we're talking about, right? Earth's evil twin. So, you know, we don't know for sure that these molecules could point towards life. There could be some unknown, unexpected chemistry that we've never come across here on Earth, but is, you know, really common in Venus for some reason. So there's a lot more work needed to understand these results, maybe send a follow-up mission to Venus as well, you know, to try and work out what's actually happening here. But I think what this really points towards is how difficult it will be to declare,

like, life has been found either in the solar system or out there in the universe, like in an exoplanet's atmosphere. Because, you know, we've heard about how the James Webb Space Telescope is searching for these biosignatures, these molecules that show that life might be there. But we can never really be sure

that that's what we've detected because it could be some other unknown chemistry as well, unless we send a probe and it's literally like, yeah, there's life here, you know, which is much more feasible in the solar system, but not so much for exoplanets that are a few hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe 10,000 light years away.

But that recent result at the National Astronomy Meeting is really, really interesting. And I'm really excited to see what comes of that and when the research paper comes out, because I wasn't in the room at the time. Robert, you went to NAMD. Were you there for that? I was, yeah.

I watched it, yeah. I mean, they were being very cautious. I mean, Jane Groves has done some work on this as well. She's quite central to this and rightly being very cautious about it and just saying, well, we've got this really interesting tentative detection and showing the spectra and so on and saying, but we want to do follow-up work. We want to use telescopes like the very large radio telescope in the US just to confirm it. Because if you get it from different observatories

with different setups, you can be a lot more confident. So we will see. It would be great, wouldn't it, to see this play out. And then I guess we just look to the missions that go there sometime in the next decade and see what they see, whether they confirm it, too. So we've talked a lot about how we're going to study Venus in the future. But how have we studied Venus throughout history? Luckily for us, the Royal Astronomical Society's archive is full of such stories. So it's off to Burlington House, yes, with the fancy library and the slidy little ladder thing, where I met with Sian Prosser, the librarian at the Royal Astronomical Society. She arrived with a big old pile of books and started off with one by a very

familiar astronomer published in 1623. We have an amazing collection of early printed books and dozens of books by the astronomer Galileo Galilei, who made so many discoveries and was so pivotal in the history of science. When was this? Galileo started using a telescope in 1610, and it was in that year that he published his first telescope observations. For example, he was able to show that Jupiter was orbited by satellites, by moons, and he also showed the geographical features of the moon, the craters and the valleys, etc., in the copper plates that he included.

of the moon, the craters and the valleys, et cetera, in the copper plates that he included. But he did not include any detailed observations of Venus. He did, though, make some sketches. And I believe in communication with Kepler, soon after he started using a telescope, he sent an anagram to Kepler, which, if you decode it, reveals that Galileo has detected that there are phases of Venus. And that was an important piece of evidence to support heliocentric theory of the sun being at the center of the solar system. So it was not until 1623, though, that Galileo published a copper plate showing the sketches of the phases of Venus. And given that Galileo sent Kepler a coded message, would that be because he was conscious that it could have been intercepted by the church?

And we're talking about a heliocentric solar system, which sort of was not what the church was in favour of at the time. That's a very good question from what I've read. He communicated his theory to Kepler in the form of this anagram, this cipher, because he wanted priority. He wanted credit for this discovery. He didn't want the letter to be intercepted for somebody else to claim that they'd made this discovery. Okay, that makes sense. Fair enough.

So can we, let's open up this book. So just a little, almost towards the end of it, actually. Oh, amazing. So we've got this square image in the top right corner is a little sketch of Saturn. And then in the top right is Jupiter and Mars and then and they're they're just sort of Saturn is a circle with a ring around it and then Jupiter and Mars are a bigger and a smaller circle and then we've got the different phases of Venus which you know

they look quite similar to if you were looking at phases of the moon, aren't they? Yes, they do. So you've got a really large crescent for the crescent phase of Venus. Then it starts waning to a smaller crescent and then it's half illuminated and it's getting smaller. If you look at the angular size of the telescope. And then finally, you've got the fully illuminated disc which is when venus appears at its smallest but it's also at the far side of its orbit of the sun so that's why it's got the full brightness of the reflection of the sun amazing so that's stop one in our grand tour of how people throughout the years have monitored venus so what's next? What's the next book you've got for us? So we're going to move on to transits of Venus

and we can talk a little bit about the context of a transit of Venus observation. Kepler in 1627 published his Rudolfine Tables, a vastly improved, much more accurate set of planetary tables, which meant that you could accurately calculate the position of planets on a given date, including phenomena such as conjunctions and transits of planets like Mercury and Venus as they're passing across the sun's disk.

What book have you got up next for us, Sian? I've got a book that relates to the 18th century transits of Venus and one very unlucky astronomer. Okay, let's get it out. Oh, that is a big old thick book. That is a tome. And it's volume two. Okay.

Of two huge and very heavy books. The spine says Voyage au Mer de l'Inde, Voyages to the Indian Ocean. And it's by an astronomer called Guillaume Le Gentil. So when would this have been then? So when did Guillaume le gentil so when would this have been then so when when did guillaume go off on this expedition he set out to the indian ocean in 1760 1761 he was an astronomer based in paris who had great renown and was sent by on of the orders of the king to make the observation that was due to be visible in various places around the Indian Ocean in 1761. And the place

that he headed for first was Pondicherry in India. We've joked there are two volumes of this. Just tell us how long did that overall expedition take? Because it's quite a while. Tell us, how long did that overall expedition take? Because it's quite a while. It's been described by Helen Sawyer Hogg as an 11-year voyage, which is probably the longest-lasting astronomical expedition in history. I mean, 11 years is a long time to be away.

It didn't quite go to plan, did it? So what happened? It didn't. And it's very difficult to distill 11 years into a few sentences. But in brief, he was unable to make the observation of the first transit because war broke out in India, in Pondicherry. So he was unable to get to the right place in time for that. For the second observation, and this is somebody who is really planning ahead, making the most of the fact that he'd gone to the other side of the world. He's like, okay, I'm going to really succeed next time. And I think the best place to go will be Manila in the Philippines. So he started planning his expedition to the Philippines in 1765. When

he finally makes it there, there is hostility from the Spanish authorities. So unfortunately, he has to turn back to Pondicherry, which did not have such favorable weather conditions. And sure enough, at the moment of the transit, it was just too cloudy for him to measure the planet moving across the sun's disk. You have to laugh because that is really unfortunate. I think a lot of us who like astronomy have those moments of, oh, you're really hoping to see something. Take the eclipse in America recently. You make a bit of an effort to try and see that. But to be away for 11 years to see two transits and you miss both of them,

that's quite something. It's really unfortunate and it shows how astronomers were, maybe still are, subject to the weather, to politics, and also just to biology and human nature and nature itself. But he made good use of his time as far as he could. Let's take a look at the volume two of the books. Got some nice plates showing, for example, the 1766 solar eclipse, a really nice engraving of that. He was able to observe a comet. He got interested in Indian astronomy and he did a lot of mapping. This book was dedicated to the king. He's really made a big effort to justify the scientific work

he carried out, even if he didn't actually carry out detailed observations of the transit. These books took years to come out because when he came back to Paris after his expedition, yet more bad luck was heaped upon him. I don't know what happened. Well, it looks like there were some failures of communication and people thought that he was dead. So not only did he go away for 11 years, not manage to see the transit of Venus, he came home to everyone thinking that he'd passed away. Yep. he lost his

position at the royal academy of sciences i think that he'd lost his property and i have read that his wife had remarried as well but i think that you know on wikipedia it says this is dubious and we need a better citation for that but But he lost a lot. That is actually incredibly unfortunate. Like I know we were joking, but that is quite a state of things. But what's lovely about this book is the tie in of astronomy with the natural world as well. And having such strong documentation of the natural world, the night skies in other ways of these areas of the Indian Ocean, and also documenting their interpretations of science as well. Like, again, that's all part of history. And it's all very informative of what was kind of going on

in the 1700s. Thank you to Sian Prosser. And Robert, can I just ask a question to you about this? So how is it that the transit of Venus can help us tell the size of a solar system? Yeah, this is all about what's called parallax and measuring the apparent position of things in the sky and how they vary with your position on Earth or indeed in space if you do it on a larger scale. But one of the big quests in the 18th and 19th century was to scale the solar system and astronomers realized you could use transits of venus when venus goes directly between the sun and the earth to gauge that and what you would do is you would time how long it took to cross the face of the sun from different locations on earth and if you did that then the shift between the two

would tell you basically how far venus was from Earth. And that, because of Kepler's laws, which are essentially governing how the mean distance of a planet from the Sun relates to its orbital period around the Sun, you would be able to scale up accordingly. So you would know the ratio between the Earth and Venus and the ratio of the orbits. And that would ultimately allow you to gauge the distance from the Earth to the Sun and then scale the rest of the solar system. So it's a really, really important thing to do. It also happens to have been really difficult because the observations are quite tricky because those of us who saw the transits of Venus, I saw the one in 2004, absolutely massive, massive event, and then briefly the one in 2012. But what you

realise is that it isn't a precise thing. It's actually quite hard to measure. So there were quite big errors on it. It was never going to be the precise method people wanted um it's very difficult to work out exactly when venus is touching the the edge of the solar disk so it was a challenge to use it and these days you can use radar to get much better results but you can see what the thinking was and why these expeditions went out to try and find it and it's even more challenging when uh you get turned around because of war or sort of disappear for 11 years as well there are the geopolitical risks of the 18th century shouldn't be understated in this i think exactly yeah it's whatever the challenges and astronomical expeditions today which are very very well at least also because

the i'm sure the clocks they had back then weren't exactly very precise for doing timings of when things appeared and disappeared as well so it's no wonder that the uncertainties they had were giant but uh yeah it's incredible to think that something so small could unlock you know know, all of those, you know, sort of almost like calibrations to say, OK, well, how far away is Jupiter? How far away is Saturn? You know, just the sort of domino effect from just that one measurement. Yeah, and that's almost like an entire episode on astronomy. That was also the era when clocks were getting better, but not quite. One of the most famous explorers, Captain Cook in the 18th century, was actually funded, I think, in the Royal Society and so to go and do a scientific expedition an astronomical expedition to the Pacific

to measure the transit of Venus in 1769 he went to Tahiti to do it carrying sea clocks was meant that he didn't get lost in the Pacific in the same way and it was better but you're right I mean precision in timing precision and actually I mean if you ever look at one of these things, trying to gauge that, I just look and I think it's ridiculous to use it as a measure. You know, sort of sitting there going, is it touching? Well, maybe. You know, just sort of, yeah, really hard to do. Yeah, it makes me almost glad that what I do is just sit at my desk and code all day for my astrophysics job. Precision to that, isn't it? Hopefully.

Ten year trip to dhenti who knows this is the super massive podcast from the royal astronomical society with me astrophysicist dr becky smithhurst and science journalist izzy clark this month it's all about venus and we had a surprising amount of questions from our lovely listeners so becky fiona wants to know what gives the atmosphere the pressure to crush anything that enters it um i mean just how much of it's there fiona right so i mean the atmosphere on venus is like 93 times thicker than on earth which means it's just a lot more air for want of a better phrase I don't know if you want to call Venus's atmosphere air but a lot more air molecules pushing down on top of you in one big column above your head right so even though you can't see those air molecules there is a huge

weight there right which exerts a pressure so if you think about okay 93 times thicker than earth and you sort of translate that to maybe units that we can really understand like this would be a hundred kilograms for every square centimeter of your body like pushing down on you like that's like having the weight of a washing machine on your thumbnail but your entire body's made of thumbnails and there's all those washing machines pushing down on you right so it's all your body so all of those air molecules of Venus's atmosphere is always pushing down with all that weight which eventually crushes most things humans probably feel it quickly metal probes maybe slightly slightly longer amounts of time but still yeah a huge a huge amount of pressure gosh that is that's a massive amount of pressure okay Robert the youngest air on Instagram asks why doesn't Venus have any moons?

Well, good question from the Youngest Air there. I mean, it is a bit of a mystery because it's similar in size to the Earth and there's no kind of reason in principle it couldn't, particularly as Mars does as well, even though Mars' moons are much, much smaller. And one idea is that being close to the sun makes it hard to have more material to grab. But that doesn't sound very convincing to me. But, you know, it's one suggestion suggestion another is this intriguing double impact theory now this seems a bit contrived too although i quite like it because it sounds quite fun but the idea there is that a large object hit venus and might have created a moon in the same way we got our moon

but then a second large collision hitting the planet slowed down its rotation, made its rotation retrograde. And then the weakened tidal forces caused that moon to collide with the planet. Now, much as this has a certain appeal to it, I'm not quite sure how easy it would be to test because, you know, that moon. Well, some of it would be completely absorbed by Venus and presumably indistinguishable and the fragments would be scattered across the solar system. So I suspect it's really, really hard to establish exactly whether that ever happened. And yeah, it remains a mystery is the best answer to that question. Okay, okay. And Becky, West Maximilian's question is,

what exactly are those weird sounds you hear on the Venera recordings? So for context, the Venera program was a series of space probes from the soviet union that gathered information about the planet venus between 1961 and 1984 we did try to find an original recording but we couldn't be too sure on the source of that so just take our word for it they were definitely made um yeah yeah they were definitely made so it was venera 13 that was took these audio recordings when i'm 13 i'm 14 both took them but venera 13 was the first mission to send back sound recordings from another planet right after it's landed ascended through the atmosphere to the surface of venus

in march 1982 um and there were loads of different scientific instruments on board, as you'd expect, from like simple thermometers to spectrometers, plus microphones on the probe recording like atmospheric wind noises, essentially, with, you know, eventually what they did was measure the wind speed from it. But there was also, you know, a lot of noises from the equipment as well on board Venera. So there is actually an academic paper you can read, even though we couldn't find the audio uh it's from July 1982 and it's called acoustic measurements of the wind velocity at the Venera 13 and Venera 14 landing sites and they do show a graph of like the acoustic signals that they detected as we said couldn't find a source to actually listen to what they sound like I didn't really trust SoundCloud or reddit yeah exactly i found i found myself in a bit of a rabbit hole of like weird wooshy sounds you're like i guess this could be maybe yeah it just goes to show you how spoiled we are with the archives from nasa and isa right

you know they really archive everything so so well but if anyone does know where the copy of like original recordings from venera can be found you know there's no by email or on social media we can always play it in a future episode but But in the research paper that I was reading, it says, upon landing, the instrument initially recorded the noise produced by the spacecraft systems themselves. So the cap on the television camera was removed by pyrotechnic charges. The drilling equipment came into operation and so on. Then it says, in the interval between the 180th and 240th second, on the other hand, there was a substantial acoustic signal of unknown origin. And it goes on to say that one author suggested that the signal

could represent wind noise on the microphone. So what they did was they tested this in a lab on earth, like with an identical setup. And what they did then was like calibrate the speed of the wind that they were throwing at the microphone with the noise that was then recorded and then they could sort of calibrate to say okay how much noise you detect versus what the actual wind speed was and then they could say okay well then let's take the wind noise that was measured by the venera probe and they found that the velocities of the speed of the wind on venus was between 0.35 and 0.57 meters per second which was actually also consistent with like a rate of drift of soil particles across the spacecraft lander ring that had already been reported as well from venera so weird sounds i don't know spacecraft itself and

wind according to the team that obtained the recordings so i guess we can link that paper in the in the podcast description yeah absolutely and robert yan folksmart asks in the early days of planet exploration why did the usa focus on mars and the soviet union on venus yeah it's it's really very obvious when you look at the missions that this is how things played out and And partly, I think it's down to success and failure. So from 1960, the Russians, the Soviet Union, made their first attempt to send missions to Mars. And the vast majority of their attempts were really unsuccessful. So they had some orbites that were successful in mapping the red planet from orbit, but all their land has failed. And many of them didn't even leave Earth orbit. You know, there's a long history of failure. It also goes right into the 1990s and beyond. They've really bad luck with that. Whereas at

Venus, they had much more luck. They were able to send quite robust spacecraft through the atmosphere to land on the surface, which in some ways, surviving on the surface of Venus is really hard, but going down through the atmosphere is a bit easier in some ways because it's much thicker. So breaking is that much easier. And a number of those were able to transmit signals for an hour, an hour and a half or so, and they remained the only country, I think, that's actually done that successfully. So the Russians, I think, then built on that success and carried on doing that right through the 1970s and into the 1980s. And it was also, at the start of the space age, it was an interesting target because we didn't really

know what the surface was like. We knew it had, I guess, a carbon dioxide atmosphere, but there was speculation about how hot it was on the surface or not hot. You know, there's a thought maybe it wouldn't be all that different to the Earth. And so people speculated about things like oceans on the surface and even life, you know, much more sophisticated than talking about simple bacteria producing phosphine in the atmosphere. You know, I guess we're talking about sort of sea life. And so there's a lot of interest in it. And because it's similar in size to the Earth, it's easy to see why people wanted to believe that and speculated that it was habitable.

But obviously, once we realised it was actually hot enough to melt lead and the aforementioned raining sulfuric acid and the fact, you know, as Becky referred to the 93 times the atmospheric pressure of the earth at the surface it's not an easy place to live let alone for a space probe to survive so it isn't really surviving uh surprising that they only lasted about an hour or so even these really tough russian missions that landed on the surface but there is obviously interest in going back there again now because of the possibility of well let's not say life but something interesting going on in the clouds of venus let's placate the chemists and be like, we could discover unknown chemistry.

Exactly. Whatever its origin. Something for the chemists out there. Send the astrochemists, not the astrologists just yet. Well, thank you to everyone who sent in their questions. And if you have one that you want us to answer in a future episode, then please get in touch. You can email podcast at res.ac.uk or find us on Instagram at supermassivepod. So let's finish as usual with some stargazing.

What can we see in the night sky this month, Robert? Any chance of Venus? It's actually really difficult until September onwards. I think it's still a little tricky to see. You probably would have to wait for the sun to set and then try with a pair of binoculars or a telescope it's really quite tough at the moment but it will get a lot easier so uh this time of year though you've got the wonderful august milky way which is which is fabulous you know still in the summer months again if you're going i think i've said this before but if you're going on holiday further

south in the mediterranean enjoy the view at least take a pair of binoculars with you because the stars are just that much brighter if you go further south uh and but in terms of things you can see wherever well at least in the northern hemisphere you've got the pursuance meteor shower on the 12th to the 13th of august that's the peak of that but obviously a few days either side is good too and on the peak night the moon sets by about 11 o'clock in the evening so if you if you're a owl, if you stay up after midnight, then you've got, essentially, if you've got a clear sky, quite a nice view, you know, get away from streetlights as we always advise in these cases.

Even by like 10 o'clock, though, I mean, it's going to be where the most trees around and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. Like, I'll probably sneak out at that time. I'm not a night owl, let's be honest. You're not? No, I'm in the wrong profession. That's honest you're not I'm in the wrong profession that's why you're doing lots of coding and theoretical and that explains it you know it's a but look I mean

actually I always think as well with the Percy it's when you get to the 10 o'clock or so you can be sitting there with the drink and you get these sort of earth grazing meteors the ones that are just skimming the earth's atmosphere and they can be quite bright and spectacular so you might not see as many but it's a nice thing to look out for it's just something something you should enjoy, you know, and if you're a great meteor photographer, so be it, but otherwise just enjoy the view. However, there's other stuff. Saturn is going to be occulted by the moon, which is quite unusual on the 21st of August. And that's actually visible from the UK, which again, you know, they're not that common, these things, they tend to be, you know, less than once a decade. I think the last time was about 2007 that one was visible here.

But you do need to get up at about half four in the morning to see it. And the timing is roughly 4.28 through to 5.21 in the morning. So definitely a night out or a lark job, depending on how you see yourself. But it is a nice thing to see. I mean, I remember videoing one of these things once. It's really quite cool to see Saturn going behind the moon. But so do take a look at that. The moon moving through the Pleiades on the 26th of August is nice too.

That's a nice big autumn cluster of stars. And you can watch it moving in front of that star background. Think again about photography. Would that be really great? And this time of year, keep looking out for things like noctilucent clouds. I saw a wonderful display last month, actually, really fantastic. These are these clouds that are very high up. clouds. I saw a wonderful display last month, actually, really fantastic. These clouds are very high up. And if you look around sort of 11 o'clock midnight onwards, they're still shining

in the summer months. It's really weird. You know, they look much, much brighter than the sky. Very strange things to see. They're simply so high up, they're catching sunlight. And of course, at the moment, we've also got really active sun. I took a picture a few days ago, absolutely peppered with spots. And that might mean, so look at it carefully with the right filters, all the usual caveats, don't damage your eyes, but it might mean displays of the Northern Lights, the aurora, who knows, you know, unpredictable, but just look out for alerts. And then finally, the thing we're all sort of waiting for, even though it'll be a very brief event, is there's this nova, this stellar binary system,

where there might just be this eruption in this star system called T. coronaborealis. Now, it'll erupt. Apparently, it'll only be at its brightest for about half a day. So blink and you miss it. But it'll be about as bright as the pole star, maybe. And it'll fade off slowly. There's a lot of interest in it because it's gone through a recent fading.

And that's exactly what happened when it erupted 80 years ago. And we think it does it on roughly that times time scale so people are quite interested in looking out for that and the only thing i can suggest i think is keeping an eye on social media alerts um maybe some news sites but my guess will be given the time scale you know you'll have to be pretty quick to catch it at its brightest and hope for clear skies but it is something that's really intriguing it's a it's a once in a lifetime thing it's not going to be so bright it's in daylight but it's just one of those things that would be so cool to see because it's so rare so fingers crossed right i need the super massive whatsapp group to really do we need you to be telling you about this like like with the northern

lights and so yeah anymore i mean i mean then i just have then the only thing i have to navigate against is the london clouds London clouds and all of that. We told you, though, is you've got to do homework if you want to see three Corona Borealis, right? You've got to see what that part of the sky looks like normally. Otherwise, you're never going to notice just a random star that's as bright as the pole star that's just appeared. Because let's be honest, the pole star, not that bright.

No, it's true. It's true. I mean, it looks like a crown shape. It does actually look like... So Corona Borealis means the Northern Crown. It does look. I mean, it's, yeah. I mean, it looks like a crown shape. It does actually look like, so coronaborius means the northern crown. It does look like this beautiful arc of stars in the sky. So learn that. And then if this thing erupts,

it will basically be distorting that shape, you know, this extra star there in the wrong place. So it's not hard to find, but yeah. Right. Well, I think that's it for this month. We'll be back next time with another bonus episode. And then after that, we are finishing off

the tour of the solar system once and for all with an episode I literally just bashed the table there once and for all with an episode on Mercury

well sadly I don't think I'll have another 12 week old kitten dubbed Mercury at that point just the one kitten just getting called

I think you should I think you should try I think you know let's just keep going until it gets a bit too much. I'll happily sacrifice becoming a crazy cat lady. That's fine. But anyway, contact us if you try some astronomy at home, especially if you try it with cats in the vicinity.

Always send us those pictures. But it's at supermassivepod on Instagram, or you can email your questions to podcast.ras.ac.uk, and we'll try and cover them in a future episode. But until next time, everybody, happy stargazing.