NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise

[perihelions]

- "Several upcoming missions, including NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging)"

DAVINCI is actually cancelled in the latest budget request. For obvious reasons, the NASA press office (the OP) won't talk about this. But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone.

https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-...

[gammarator]

> But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone.

The proposed cuts to science are catastrophic, but there’s still time to call your Congressperson.

https://aas.org/posts/news/2025/05/week-of-action

[trelane]

The full proposed budget is available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal... folks are interested in seeing the whole picture and reasoning.

[goodcanadian]

I would remind everyone that congress sets the budget. This is merely a proposal from the president. The proposal is regularly ignored. Nothing has been cancelled, yet, merely proposed to be cancelled.

[jmclnx]

That really stinks. As I said before, the US is handing all good research and science ti China.

[p1mrx]

> Scientists expected the outermost layer of Venus’ crust would grow thicker and thicker over time

I recall watching this NOVA episode in 1995 where scientists had no idea whether the lithosphere is thick or thin. Seek to 36 minutes: https://archive.org/details/VenusUnveiled/NOVA.S22E10.Venus....

[bryan0]

I remember that episode being excellent! Scientists could tell that Venus’s crust was somehow reforming because of the crater pattern but the didn’t know whether it was gradual change or something catastrophic, and the thickness of the crust would point to one way or the other but they didn’t have that data.

> The paper used modeling to determine that its crust is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) thick on average and at most 40 miles (65 kilometers) thick.

So would that be considered “thick” or “thin”?

[geuis]

I'm blown away at the number of huge volcanos and relative lack of craters. If that's right, Venus must recycle its surface relatively often.

[floxy]

Are you just looking at the photo to determine volcanoes and craters? Wouldn't we expect that with so much atmosphere on Venus, that meteors would have a much harder time reaching the surface? That is, much larger ones would burn up or get deflected than on Earth.

[quotemstr]

Venus is a damned shame. Had planetary evolution gone just slightly differently, the solar system could have had two habitable water planets. Mars, owing to its size, was never going to cut it, but Venus might have.

[saalweachter]

Crazy factoid one: The Earth masses more than everything else between the Sun and Jupiter combined.

Crazy factoid two: Venus is 80% of the Earth's mass.

[netsharc]

I wonder how a system with 2 planets with intelligent lifeforms would've developed culturally and politically... if both civilizations grew at the same rate, 2 Galileos would've looked at the other planet and figured out "we have neighbors!", but it'd be several hundred more years before communication could be done. Even know we don't have manned missions to Mars or Venus...

[WalterBright]

I wonder if Venus could be terraformed via a sun shield placed in orbit around it. How big would it have to be to reverse the runaway greenhouse effect?

[gamescr]

Part of the problem is having too much atmosphere. In the original Cosmos Carl Sagan talked about a hypothetical solution where we capture asteroids, and throw them at Venus in such a way that they just nick the atmosphere and knock large quantities of atmosphere out into space. One you reduce atmospheric pressure to a certain level, things could become habitable.

Then throw in iron form the atseroid belt to react with it to form carbonates. Venus is dry so brining in hydrogen form the outer planets would be necessary anyway to form wate r and thta will account for a good bit. Garden the surface so subsurface rocks which might react with the atmosphere cna absorb some. (Assumign the subsurface rocks are thta reactive.) Scoop it off with smaller versions of the same scoops used to harvets hydrogen from the gas giants.

[cyberax]

I've read a crazy proposal:

1. "Humidify" the atmosphere by crashing comets into Venus. This will also allow us to create a temporary "cloud" around Venus that can shield it from the Sun and lower down the temperature.

2. Once the temperature is low enough, Venus will get oceans on its surface.

3. At this point, CO2 can be split into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen will be immediately bound by the huge amount of under-oxidized iron on the surface, and carbon can be buried under the new ocean. Essentially, carboniferous age for Venus.

4. Once this is done, the atmosphere will be mostly nitrogen (at ~3 bar) and people could live there with just respirators. Eventually, once the surface iron is oxidized, the atmosphere can even be made breathable.

Apparently, this can be done within 2000-5000 years without any exotic-level engineering.

[monkeyfun]

If you're interested in human habitation of Venus overall, you may find it interesting to learn Venus is probably preferable kept at about its current temperature or only made a little colder.

See, the atmosphere at ~50 altitude... happens to be about 1 bar (which happens to be Earth's atmospheric pressure ASL)... and happens to have temperatures that can support human and plant life!

And better still, the atmosphere being mostly co2 with a little nitrogen actually means normal Earth air is a lifting gas! Starting to see where this is going?

It's not too hard to imagine the skies of Venus full of floating habitats that move to stay in the sunlight, or occasionally dock with tethers or balloons carrying cargo from extremely reinforced mining facilities deep underground (where they could be much more protected most of the time from the pressure/temperature/corrosion) -- a future where people (or machines!) might scoff at the idea of cooling off Venus and losing out on such an excellent habitation zone, one which could also fairly easily support elevated runways or launch platforms to more cheaply reach space from.

With Venus also having 91% of Earth's gravity, and those atmospheric conditions at high altitudes that add some radiation shielding and would probably let a human worker only need a very limited suit more akin to a hazmat or firefighting suit with SCBA to work outside habitats... Venus is actually easily the single best planet for humans to live on after Earth!

(Can you tell I'm writing a story set there? Hehehe)

[jovas]

Venus has a retrograde day that is longer than it's year.

While the atmosphere is a big problem, even without this issue the rotation would be problematic.

[vardump]

Venus probably doesn't have enough hydrogen to be of any use.

[kgwxd]

Sounds delicious.

[minitoar]

I would absolutely demolish a Venus Crust Surprise

[minitoar]

Surprised at all the dead humor comments. Is humor against the guidelines?

[ossopite]

From the headline I can't decide if it was a study in astronomy or gastronomy