Notes

P/D/F/W deadline is today

Cannot use P/D/F for science general ed at Columbia

Registra9on- in addi9on to the astronomy courses

I men9oned earlier, theres also Mechanical and
Industrial Engineering E4810 INTRO TO HUMAN
SPACE FLIGHT
Outline: Venus, start Mars
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Venus, Earth, and Mars

All three were at
some point
volcanically ac9ve,
and should have been
hit by comets.
The resul9ng
secondary
atmospheres are very
dierent.
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From `The Discovery of Global Warming

1958- radio obs. suggest Venus is really hot
1960- grad student Carl Sagan showed that the
greenhouse eect could be the cause (but he blamed
water vapor)
1969 & 1970: scien9c papers published in Jrnl Atm Sci
and Nature suggested that it was CO2
First the water evaporated
Then Venus so hot and dry that Carbon compounds
evaporated rather than remaining in rocks, releasing
CO2
Suggested that if Earth were only 6% closer to the Sun,
it too might have ended up hot and dry
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Nature June 13, 1970

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 Early 1970s telescopic data of Venus showed that the

thick clouds were made of SULPHUR
Led to more concerns on Earth about sulphur in our
air from volcanoes and pollu9on, and a more serious
study of smog

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Venus explora9ons
Venura missions- Russian
1961-1983- 16 Missions
A few early missions sent back atmospheric data and burned
up
9, 10 and 13 landed and sent back pictures

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Venus con9nued:
Atmosphere is 96% CO2, 3.5% N2
some Ar + O2 + H2O + sulfur dioxide
Like Mars atm in content but > 10,000x more massive
Runaway greenhouse eect
small rise in energy output from Sun, or increase in
atmospheric CO2 leads to more evapora9on of H2O, and
more release of gas from surface rocks
Solar UV broke up H2O vapor, H escaped, O combined with
other atoms or escaped
Temperatures rise as the new equilibrium is established
Eect is NOT reversible- larger bodies of water have evaporated,
H2O is split into H and O, H escaped. Some scien9sts believe
Venus once had as much water as Earth, but its GONE
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Venus

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Was Venus the rst habitable world of our solar

system?

M. J. Way, Anthony D. Del Genio, Nancy Y. Kiang1, Linda E.
Sohl, David H. Grinspoon, Igor Aleinov, Maxwell Kelley, and
Thomas Clune
NASA Goddard Ins9tute for Space Studies, New York, New
York, USA, Department of Astronomy and Space Physics,
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, 3Center for Climate
Systems Research, Columbia University, New York, New
York, USA, 4Planetary Science Ins9tute, Tucson, Arizona,
USA, 5Global Modeling and Assimila9on Oce, NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
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 Abstract: Present-day Venus is an inhospitable place with surface

temperatures approaching 750 K and an atmosphere 90 9mes as thick

as Earths. Billions of years ago the picture may have been very
dierent. We have created a suite of 3-D climate simula9ons using
topographic data from the Magellan mission, solar spectral irradiance
es9mates for 2.9 and 0.715 Gya, present-day Venus orbital parameters,
an ocean volume consistent with current theory, and an atmospheric
composi9on es9mated for early Venus. Using these parameters we nd
that such a world could have had moderate temperatures if Venus had
a prograde rota9on period slower than ~16 Earth days, despite an
incident solar ux 4670% higher than Earth receives. At its current
rota9on period, Venuss climate could have remained habitable un9l at
least 0.715 Gya.

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Ancient Venus

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