The k2p blog

Japanese Spacecraft Approaches Venus

Venus Climate Orbiter “AKATSUKI”

This from NASA Science News:

Imamura is the project scientist for Akatsuki, a Japanese mission also called the Venus Climate Orbiter. The spacecraft is approaching Venus and will enter orbit on December 7, 2010. Imamura believes a close-up look at Venus could teach us a lot about our own planet.

“In so many ways, Venus is similar to Earth. It has about the same mass, is approximately the same distance from the sun, and is made of the same basic materials,” says Imamura. “Yet the two worlds ended up so different. We want to know why.”

Considering NASA’s own Venus fact sheet and the fact that Venus is about 41 million km closer to the sun it is – in the kindest interpretation – sloppy to permit a statement that “Venus is similar to earth.. approximately the same distance from the sun”.

“By comparing Venus’s unique meteorology to Earth’s, we’ll learn more about the universal principles of meteorology and improve the climate models we use to predict our planet’s future” says Imamura.

Of course the models will no doubt take into account that solar radiation on Venus is about  2688 J while the Earth receives 1365 J or perhaps the models don’t need the sun and will base everything on the heating effects of carbon dioxide.

I would have thought that it is the differences between Venus and Earth which can be revealing and to consider a distance of 41 million km closer to the sun as being negligible does not inspire confidence in any subsequent climate modelling.

Tags: climate change, computer modelling, Science

This entry was posted on August 17, 2010 at 11:26 am and is filed under Environment, Media, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.