Planet Project Venus By: Imani Tyakoff

Venus is the second planet from the Sun and is the second brightest object in the night sky after the Moon. Named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, Venus is the second largest terrestrial planet and is sometimes referred to as the Earth’s sister planet due the their similar size and mass. Before astronomers discovered that Venus is a planet, people believed it to be two different stars, known as The Morning Star and The Evening Star The surface of the planet is obscured by an opaque layer of clouds made up of sulfuric acid.

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. The thick clouds also mean that heat cannot escape from the planet, meaning that Venus' temperature can be 480°c, so it is the hottest planet in the Solar System, even hotter than Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun! The Earth has an average surface temperature of 14 degrees Celsius, the average temperature of Venus is 460 degrees Celsius. That is 410 degrees hotter than the hottest deserts on our planet.

Venus is the second closest planet to the sun at a distance of about 108 million km (67 million miles) or 0.72 AU. Venus takes 243 days to turn once on its axis, and it takes almost 225 days to travel once around the Sun in orbit. As you can see, a day on Venus is longer than its year.

Since Venus and Earth are almost the same size and have about the same mass, the surface gravity on Venus is almost the same as the surface gravity on Earth. The surface gravity on Venus is about 91% of the surface gravity on Earth, so if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you would weigh 91 pounds on Venus !

Venus has high mountains, many of which appear to be volcanic in origin. The bright region near the center in the polar hemispheric view is Maxwell Montes, the highest mountain range on Venus; it reaches an elevation of 11 km above average elevation (2 km more than the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level on Earth). There is strong evidence that volcanoes have erupted on Venus in the geologically recent past, and strong indirect evidence from observations like changing chemical composition of the atmosphere and the detection of lightning in certain regions that volcanoes are presently active on Venus, though we do not yet. The surface of Venus has been smoothed by recent lava flows and by interaction with the corrosive atmosphere.

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