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Space

Russian Announces Plan to Independently Explore Venus (euronews.com) 36

Posted by EditorDavid from the looking-for-life dept.
"Russia has announced an intention to independently explore Venus a day after scientists said there was a gas that could be present in the planet's clouds due to single-cell microbes," reports Euronews: The head of Russia's space corporation Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, told reporters that they would initiate a national project as "we believe that Venus is a Russian planet," according to the TASS news agency. In a statement, Roscosmos noted that the first missions to explore Venus were carried out by the Soviet Union. "The enormous gap between the Soviet Union and its competitors in the investigation of Venus contributed to the fact that the United States called Venus a Soviet planet," Roscosmos said.

The Russians claim to have extensive material that suggests that some objects on the Venusian surface have changed places or could be alive, although these are hypotheses that have yet to be confirmed.

The national project would be in addition to the "Venera-D" project that the Russians are working on with the US' National Aeronautics and Space Administration... Roscosmos said they would study the soil and atmosphere of the planet as well as the "evolutionary processes of Venus, which allegedly suffered a climatic catastrophe associated with the greenhouse effect."
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Russian Announces Plan to Independently Explore Venus More

Russian Announces Plan to Independently Explore Venus

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  • Dont the russians already have a probe on the surface of venus? Pretty sure that they were the first to land something....

    • Building on old successes (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Laxator2 ( 973549 ) on Saturday September 19, 2020 @12:27PM (#60521854)

      The Russians were the first to land a probe on Venus and get data on temperature/pressure as well as the (so far) only pictures of the surface.
      Their probe lasted for about one hour in those conditions, but it was enough to send quite a bit of scientific data back.
      They now feel that they can build on the old success and addtionally, they always botched their missions to Mars.
      Nowadays there is a lot of talk about colonizing Mars, and a big factor in that is NASAs success in exploring that planet.
      But growing up as a kid on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain the stories about colonizing the Solar System were all about Venus. The scientific reason was that it is easier to thin a dense atmosphere than to build one on a planet with weak gravity. Plus cooling Venus was considered feasible by building a Saturn-like ring around it tilted at the correct angle to block sunlight. It was supposed to be built from captured asteroids set on collision course close to the planet.
      And the fact that the Russians had a lot of success in exploring Venus was a clear first step. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )
      The USSR had actually done a mission that launched a weather balloon into Venus atmosphere. The balloon floated around for more than a day before being sucked down into the lower atmosphere (showing that the Venus atmosphere has some unexpected vertical currents). It's one of the less known but really cool space missions.

  • Oh did he now (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sneftel ( 15416 ) on Saturday September 19, 2020 @12:16PM (#60521830)

    Russian Announces Plan to Independently Explore Venus

    I donâ(TM)t think Dimitri plans to do it by himself.

  • If there's life on Venus, that makes Venus a Venusian planet not Russian, Asian, U.Sian or any other human's planet.
    • Even if there isn't life, it's still not part of any country or nation. I recall some hullabaloo about the legality of mining asteroids. Claiming worlds would be spectacularly worse.

      • The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which Russia and the USA amongst many other nations have signed and ratified, forbids any nation from claiming ownership over the moon, any planet or celestial body.

        Of course similar treaties govern making claims on territory in Antartica and yet many nations do. The gist is Russia could of course make such claim, but no other nation would recognize it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by quonset ( 4839537 )

      If there's life on Venus, that makes Venus a Venusian planet not Russian, Asian, U.Sian or any other human's planet.

      There were people already living in North American when the white Europeans came across the pond, but that didn't stop them from slaughtering the people living here and taking their land. Guaranteed if there is life on Venus, we'll do the same.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bjwest ( 14070 )

        There were people already living in North American when the white Europeans came across the pond, ....

        A bit off topic, but why did you specify North America? Europeans landed in Central America and slaughtered the Aztec and Inca civilizations of Central and South America long before the the North American Indian tribes started being wiped out.

        • I'm from North America so it's bias. Obviously yes, Central and South American indigenous people were slaughtered and enslaved by white Europeans.

        • Why America in the first place? When Homo sapiens came to Europe tens of thousands of years ago, there were already people there, too.

      • There were people already living in North American when the white Europeans

        Would it have been better if those Europeans hadn't been white? And if not, why mention their color at all? Conquest has been a pretty constant factor in human history, regardless of race (though race has been one of the many excuses for it)

        • There were people already living in North American when the white Europeans

          Would it have been better if those Europeans hadn't been white?

          No, the problem is that the Whites were Europeans.

          This is why Elon Musk has been chosen to colonize Mars: He's a white South African, so nobody can blame the white Europeans for the Mars Colonies.

          The Russians are choosing their Venus colonists from Siberia and Kamchatka, so they won't be white Europeans either.

      • white Europeans

        Pleonasm much?

  • It would be nice if they invited the United States to participate. I would say "hell ya!"

  • If number of successful probes to a planet by one nation is the basis for this "ownership" they have announced the Mars belongs to the U.S. The current successful probe count there is 21-to-3, with the last successful Russian/Soviet mission in 1971, almost 40 years ago (since this is all about nationalism international collaborations don't count).

  • Which one?

  • You can believe whatever you want. Here, have a lollipop and keep quiet.

  • Venus is a hell planet. It rains and snows lead. Just think about that. Anything landing there would have to survive 800F temperatures. I don't see how a computer could function there.

  • Where is Russia going to get the money for this? I suspect it's a ruse and I hope we won't fall for it like the Russians did with the Strategic Defense Initiative when Ronald Reagan was president.

  • We don't want any Venerial Diseases.

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