Volcanoes on the ‘Home World of Women’

Woman got the worse deal when author John Gray wrote a book titled ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.’  The point he was clearly making was about the communication issues between the sexes, but men definitely got the better deal in home worlds.  For one, Mars is kind of cold, has polar ice caps, is covered in rust and dust, has been pretty dead inside for millions of years, and is bombarded with radiation from the Sun (you can draw your own parallels to men yourself).  But Venus, with its 400 degree Celsius temperature, sulphuric acid rain, incredibly...

Heavy Metal Frost on Venus?

Venus is the most hellish place I know of in the Solar System, and maybe even the broader Universe.  Even though Venus looks pretty harmless and is named for the Roman goddess of Love, beneath the soft looking clouds lies sulphuric acid rainfall, 450 degree surface temperatures, and crushing pressure 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level. How do we get the surface picture of Venus above? NASA’s Magellan probe in 1994 finished mapping the surface by looking at Radio wavelengths emitted by the planet and using radar to bounce waves off the surface to measure features....