Venus TOP STORY
Peering over the shoulder of giant Saturn, through its rings, and across interplanetary space, NASA's Cassini spacecraft spies the bright, cloudy terrestrial planet, Venus. The vast distance from Saturn means that Venus only shows up as a white dot, just above and to the right of the image center.
Venus TOP STORIES
© ESA
Venus' Ionosphere
ESA's Venus Express has made unique observations of Venus during a period of reduced solar wind pressure, discovering that the planet's ionosphere balloons out like a comet's tail on its nightside.
Venus
This graphic shows the path of Venus across the face of the sun on Dec. 21, 2012, as will be seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in the Saturn system. This will be the first time a spacecraft has tracked a transit of a planet in our solar system from beyond Earth orbit.
Venus
Six years of observations by ESA's Venus Express have shown large changes in the sulphur dioxide content of the planet's atmosphere, and one intriguing possible explanation is volcanic eruptions.
Venus
Clouds regularly punctuate Earth's blue sky, but on Venus the clouds never part, for the planet is wrapped entirely in a 20 km-thick veil of carbon dioxide and sulphuric dioxide haze. This view shows the cloud tops of Venus as seen in ultraviolet light by the Venus Express spacecraft on 8 December 2011, from a distance of about 30 000 km.
Venus
Venus Express has spied a surprisingly cold region high in the planet's atmosphere that may be frigid enough for carbon dioxide to freeze out as ice or snow.
Venus
Hot, toxic, and murky, Venus serves as an extraordinary engineering challenge, according to Jim Garvin. Venus is bizarre. One day on Venus is nearly as long as one year on Earth. It rotates about its axis in the opposite direction of all the other planets in our solar system.
Venus
It is one of those rare events that captures the imagination of people around the Earth for more than a few minutes. While the headlines were filled with what is considered newsworthy yesterday, people around the world took the time, if the weather permitted, and location, to view an event most will likely never see again.
Venus
On Tuesday, 5 June 2012, Venus will cross the face of the sun - as seen from Earth beginning at 22:09 UT (6:09 PM EDT). These transits are rare - they occur in pairs and only very century or so. The last transit was in 2004. The next one will be in 2117. Below are a series of links to various resources you can use to best appreciate this once in a lifetime experience.
Venus
A Venus transit across the face of the Sun is a relatively rare event -- occurring in pairs with more than a century separating each pair. There have been all of 53 transits of Venus across the Sun between 2000 B.C. and the last one in 2004.
Venus
In the grand scheme of the solar system, Venus and Earth are almost the same distance from the Sun. Yet the planets differ dramatically: Venus is some 100 times hotter than Earth and its days more than 200 times longer.
Venus
Three months before the last transit of Venus this century, scientists are gathering at the Observatoire de Paris to finalize their observation plans in a workshop supported by the Europlanet Research Infrastructure and the EGIDE/PHC Sakura Program.
Venus
Venus Express has charted the first map of Venus's southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths. The new map hints that our neighbouring world may once have been more Earth-like, with both, a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water.