NASA Study Reveals Venus Crust Surprise

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.

> 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

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

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”?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...