Christopher Packham is a member of the physics.org.
On October 22, 1975, the Soviet Union's Venus landers separated from their orbiter and descended through the dense Venusian atmosphere, landing on a circular shield designed to crumple and absorb the impact. It survived the intense surface conditions for 53 minutes and transmitted data regarding clouds, light irradiance, temperature and atmospheric chemistry. Then it stopped working. Venus and Earth are thought to have formed through the same processes.
The Dennis and Randy Quaid of the inner solar system are vastly different from Earth and Venus. Dennis is not the same asVenus. Venus is described as a hilarious understatement.
The atmosphere of Venus is the densest and hottest of the four planets and has an atmospheric pressure of 92 times that of Earth. The planetary temperature is close to 867 degrees Fahrenheit. It's pretty bad. Even though it doesn't have a moon, the dense clouds of sulfuric acid that shroud the planet would make it hard to see at night.
Venus sheds interior heat into space. Plates pull apart and cause interior heat loss, but little is known about the interior dynamics of Venus.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, conducted an analysis of data gathered by the Magellan spaceship in the 1990s to calculate the thickness of the crust on Venus. Venus' evolution and interior dynamics are constrained by the fact that Earth and Venus have the same heat flow. The results are in a journal.
Mobile tectonic plates that slide around crash into each other in order to facilitate efficient heat loss. Venus was thought to have either a "stagnant lid" or an "episodic lid" in which an unstable lid occasionally burst into tectonic activity. These proposals are not supported by models and data analysis. The model suggested by the JPL researchers is a squishy-lid model.
The researchers used the flex within surface formations called coronae to calculate the thickness of the lithoosphere. They calculated an average heat flow from Venus higher than the Earth's average, using data from 75 locations within 65 coronae.
The authors suggest that Venus has an Earth-like thickness and global heat flow range. Our findings support a squishy-lid convective regime that uses intrusive magmatism and delamination to increase heat flow.
Many researchers believe that the origin of Earth's plate tectonics could be traced back to the beginning of the Archaean Eon 4 to 2.5 billion years ago. Earth's heat flow was three times higher than it is today, and the planet was much hotter.
The squishy-lid model features limited surface mobility, intrusive magmatism, and the formation of the coronae via uplifting and downwelling. It has a mode of planetary geology that is different from Earth's.
The determination of exoplanetary habitability would be dependent on information about heat flow on planets outside of our solar system. If the group's "squishy lid" proposal is confirmed by any of the upcoming Venus observation missions, it will likely lead to a reappraisal of ideas surrounding Venus surface features and the evolution of the planet's mantle.
The heat flow on Venus is consistent with active rifting.
Diogo L. Loureno is an astronomer.
Journal information: Nature Geoscience
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