Particularly for grown-ups, it’s all too easy to get bogged down in the mundane. Some people go for months only thinking about only work targets and MOTs; big shops, sausages and SIM cards. I’m fortunate enough to have a three-year-old little girl whose endless energy is exceeded only by her curiosity about the world that we live in and all its awesome wonder. This bite-sized series is for her, as a little thank you for reminding me of it.About 67,108,000 miles from the sun spins a planet that seems to pride itself on being contrary. Once hailed on Earth as “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” due to its brightness at dawn and dusk, and later named after the Roman goddess of love for that same incandescent quality, Venus is in fact the terrestrial embodiment of Hell - the planet Earth as seen through a mirror, darkly.
At around 80% the size of our own blue orb, Venus is often referred to as Earth’s “twin” or “sister” planet, yet almost everything else about it is contradictory. You could visit Venus for a day, yet spend more than a year there as it travels around the Sun faster than it rotates on its own axis – and backwards, too. If you could stand on the planet’s blistering surface and somehow make out the dull, cloud-cloaked orange smudge that is the Sun, you’d see that it rises in the west and sets in the east, Venus’s “retrograde spin” setting it apart from every other planet in the Solar System.
But then, nobody is ever likely to be able to stand on Venus’s rocky landscape as, even if its sulphuric acid rain didn’t eat away their spacesuits and its deep-sea-like pressure didn’t give them the bends, its surface temperatures are hot enough to melt lead, and would therefore make short work of organic matter. Indeed, even Mercury, who spins a great deal closer to the Sun, can’t match Venus’s 480°c surface temperature, as it lacks the same thick, noxious clouds that trap the Sun’s heat inside the ultimate atmospheric greenhouse.
Ironically though, it is this very damning atmosphere that reflects so much sunlight back into space, leaving Venus – for all its Hellish qualities – second only to the Moon in the dominance of Earth’s night sky.