Inside a windowless concrete room in Cleveland , Ohio , scientist have built a flyspeck version of Hell on Earth .
Called the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig ( GEER ) , the 14 - gross ton brand chamber can faithfully hearten the toxic , choking , and sear - spicy conditions on the control surface of Venus — a once - inhabitable twin of Earth give-up the ghost very , very ill-timed .
scientist at the NASA Glenn Research Center , where GEER is located , have been evolve the project for thepast 5 yearsand fired it up forthe first timein 2014 . Since then , researcher have lengthened their exam runs and expose all kinds of metals , ceramic , wire , mesh , plating , and electronics to weather condition on " Venus " to see what survive — and what break up into dust .
NASA’s GEER chamber in Cleveland, Ohio.GEER/NASA Glenn Research Center
NASA ’s GEER bedchamber in Cleveland , Ohio . GEER / NASA Glenn Research Center
" In March 2015 , we spend close to 100 day at the surface of Venus , and the recollective exclusive reaching was 42 24-hour interval , " Lori Arnett , NASA ’s adeptness handler for GEER , told Business Insider .
Their promise ? Learn how to ramp up spacecraft that can last months or even old age on Venus or else of being destroyed almost instantly .
" One of the last probes to visit Venus was Venera 13 in [ 1982 ] , and it only survived for about 2 hours and 7 minutes , " said Gustavo Costa , a chemist and materials scientist who ’s act upon with GEER . " Venus is very , very corrosive . "
Until a mod space vehicle drop through the major planet ’s thick-skulled atmosphere again and research the open , GEER is the best way to ask what it ’s really like there .
" It ’s like Hell on Earth , " Costa said . " It ’s very abrasive . "
Venus is Earth ’s deadly twin
Venus in genuine color . NASA
The 2d major planet from the sunlight was , and still is , very similar to Earth .
Venusis rocky and has or so 82 % the slew and90 % the surface gravityof Earth . It also has a persistent atmosphere and scope in the sun ’s " habitable zona " ( where water can exist as a liquid state ) . Some researchers suppose the satellite once had warm , shallow oceans that werecozy to life for about 2 billion years . That could be about 1.2 billion years long enough for aliveness to issue and flourish , if you ’re usingEarth as a scorecard .
And yet its water vanished , C dioxide began clogging up the atmosphere , and — due to runaway global warming — the world was cooked to a potato chip .
The GEER sleeping room open up up . GEER / NASA Glenn Research Center
In short , Venus today is just about the forged home imaginable to visit in the solar system , and simultaneously an important analog to better realise our own major planet .
We recognise this thanks to nearly two XII successful missions there , including eight artificial satellite and 10 landers , most of them launched by the Soviet Union .
Data beamed back by these spacecraft show Venusian surface air is nearly 97 % carbon dioxide , about 100 times thick than Earth ’s standard atmosphere , and is a blistering 864 degrees Fahrenheit ( 462 degrees Celsius ) . That ’s twice the temperature needed to ignite wood and red-hot enough to mellow out lead .
But what it ’s really like to be on the surface , and what happens to materials and space vehicle that dare nation there , has n’t been clear until GEER come along .
What the open of Venus is like
A colorized picture of the surface of Venus from the Venera 13 space vehicle on March 1 , 1982.Soviet Space Agency ; IPF APOD ; Don P. Mitchell
GEER pulls together everything researchers have learned to date about surface condition on Venus into an 800 - cubic decimeter chamber . A mix machine fuse the known accelerator pedal on Venus and a knock-down heater warms them up .
" It takes two - and - a - one-half days to warm up up and five days to cool down down , " Leah Nakley , GEER ’s lead technologist , told Business Insider .
Costa says one affair he ’s come to infer by work with GEER is just how foreign the atmosphere of Venus is at the planet ’s surface .
" It ’s a supercritical fluid mixture , not just a gas , " Costa said .
Supercritical fluidsbehave like a gas and a liquidat the same time . If you drinkdecaffeinated java , you benefit from them : supercritical carbon paper dioxide is typically wash over deep brown dome to penetrate deep inside them and thaw away most of their caffeine .
A metal wire expose to Venus - like condition inside of NASA ’s GEER chamber . GEER / NASA Glenn Research Center ; Business Insider
This same matter can fall out with metal and electronics , though , which is not a good affair for ballistic capsule .
Normally rust - proof brand alloys unfreeze , leaching out metals to form pitch-black fans of minerals , like some Gothic version of a crystal - growing kit .
Costa says walking around the surface of Venus would feel like walking through air that ’s as thick as a kitty of water , at a pressure equivalent to being 100 meter ( 328 understructure ) underwater , and venomous hot .
A " breeze " of a few Admiralty mile per 60 minutes would find more like a blue-blooded undulation pushing you around at shore .
" It ’s difficult to think this . I infer it ’d be like bond yourself inside a pressure cooker , " he said .
But the air of Venus also has trace amount atomic number 1 fluoride , atomic number 1 chloride , hydrogen sulphide , and sulfuric superman , which are all super dangerous chemicals .
" rather of get water vapor clouds , Venus has sulfuric battery-acid clouds , " he said . " And you have to go through those to even get to the airfoil . That is terrifying . "
The next military mission to Venus
The planned stages of DAVINCI ’s descent to the Earth’s surface of Venus . DAVINCI / NASA
Japan is currently the only country with a spacecraft around Venus , called Akatsuki , thoughit come 5 years lateand is an orbiter , not a lander .
The US , meanwhile , has n’t launched a mission dedicated to Venus since 1989 ( the Magellan orbiter ) and has n’t bring anything on the populace in more than 45 age .
However , NASA is presently mulling the launch of a proposedVenus probe squall DAVINCI .
If NASA chooses to fully fund that commission in as part of its Discovery programme — GEER is presently being upgraded in part to fend for researching material for the blood probe — it would arrive sometime in 2023 , chute down through the ambience for 63 mo , sampling gases along the way , and take the highest - resolution simulacrum yet of the aerofoil .
In the past times , NASA researchers have also foresee droppingshiny , nuclear - power rovers on Venus . Such a missionary post might still be possible if the federal agency can design more efficient atomic batteries — and sweep over itsongoing shortage of plutonium-238 , a rare radioactive material that ’s required to fuel such ability source .
understand the original clause onTech Insider . right of first publication 2016 .
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