What will the Venus spacecraft discover about Venus when it arrives there?
444120
We know what the surface of venus looks like, the Magellan spacecraft already mapped it (altitude wise), and the Soviets landed a couple of probes on the surface a long time ago.\n\nThe new craft will not tell us what the surface looks like, you can't get any visible light info from the surface due to the thick clouds.\n\nThe ESA's stated scientific objectives for the missions are:\n    * What is the mechanism and what is the driving force of the super-rotation of the atmosphere?\n    * What are the basic processes in the general circulation of the atmosphere?\n    * What is the composition and chemistry of the lower atmosphere and the clouds?\n    * What is the past and present water balance in the atmosphere?\n    * What is the role of the radiative balance and greenhouse effect in the past present and future evolution of the planet?\n    * Is there currently volcanic and/or tectonic activity on the planet?
1054500
Venus.  \n\nIt is the second nearest planet to the sun and due to its atmosphere full of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, it has the ability to trap heat.  So, basically, major global warming is taking place on Venus.\n\nAlthough Mercury is nearer to the sun, its atmosphere is weak and contains sodium, potassium and oxygen.  These, when exposed to the sun's rays, are lost/decomposed.  Therefore, there is not much atmosphere left to trap the heat, leaving it cooler than Venus.
710856
Transits of Venus across the Sun were state-of-the-art science back in the 18th century.  That's because they were a way to calculate the size of the Solar System.   By the middle of the 18th century, Newtonian mechanics had allowed us to make a model of the Solar System where everything was correct, except that we didn't know how big it was.  Everything was done as angles from the Earth, and so the whole thing could have been bigger or smaller and still kept the same angles.  This uncertainty prevented us from knowing the size of the Sun and the distance to the stars.\n\nBut if you observed a transit of Venus from two places far apart on the Earth, like England and Tahiti, you would see the disk of Venus cross the disk of the Sun in a different path.  This would allow you to calculate the distance to Venus in comparison to the size of the Earth, which was by then well known.  Expeditions were sent out by the European powers to observe the transits of Venus from "remote" places.
1071783
When Venus was first studied in modern times, scientists saw a beautiful world that was almost the size of Earth, and it had a thick cover of clouds. The picture to the right shows what Venus looks like when seen in ultra-violet light (UV shows more contrast in the clouds). For years, Venus was called Earth's Sister Planet, and much popular science and science fiction literature was devoted to what might lie below the huge clouds. All that changed once scientists were able to measure what those lovely clouds were made of: Poisonous gases.\n\nVenus' atmosphere is so thick that a barometric reading (a measure of pressure) would be between 90 to 100 times higher than Earth's, which is the equivalent on Earth of being underneath 1 km of water. Its atmosphere is 97% carbon dioxide. This green-house gas retains almost all of the heat Venus' surface gets from the sun, and its surface temperature of 480 °C (896 °F) is the same on both sides of the planet due to the insulating nature of the clouds. This temperature is hot enough to melt lead. The clouds are rich in sulfuric acid, so any type of precipitation would "burn" with acidity.\n\nScientists have mapped more of Venus' surface than that of the Earth. While we cannot see beneath the clouds in visible light, we can bounce radar off the planet's surface. The radar that is reflected can then be used construct a map of the surface. This is the same principle that bats use to see in the dark, dolphins use to communicate, and we use to map Earth's ocean floor. There is only a small section of Venus that has not been mapped. The image to the left is a false-color image of what Venus would look like if stripped of its clouds. The darker colors indicate lower features, and the brighter colors indicate higher features.\n\nFrom the data currently available, Venus is a world composed of mountains, flatlands, and valleys -- much like the rugged terrain found on Earth. The surface has relatively few craters, which suggests that there was either recent or current volcanic activity that has erased older craters.\n\nAtmosphere\n\nAs can be seen in the planetary data table below, Venus' atmosphere is nearly 100 times as massive as Earth's, and its thick cloud layers block the surface from view. It exerts a pressure of approximately 92 bars at the surface. Its composition is nearly all CO2:\n\nCO2: 96.5% \nN2: 3.5% \nSO2: 0.015% \nAr: 0.007% \nH2O: 0.002% \nCO: 0.0017% \nHe: 0.0012% \nNe: 0.0007% \nThe density at the surface is 65,000 g/m3. Wind speeds range from 1-4 km/sec (0.5-2 mph) at the surface. The scale height of the atmosphere is about 15.9 km.\n\nVenus is the case of a runaway greenhouse effect. The temperature and pressure of the atmosphere decrease with height, so water vapor rises in the atmosphere and encounters conditions that cause it to condense back into liquid water and fall back to the surface - a region called the "cold trap." On Earth, this is at a height of 9-15 km (5-9 miles) above the surface, but on Venus it lies at an altitude around 50 km (31 miles) due to the planet's closer proximity to the sun.\n\nOn Earth, the ozone layer is several kilometers above this, and the ozone prevents ultraviolet light from destroying water in our atmosphere. On Venus, there is no ozone layer, and the atmosphere doesn't become opaque to ultraviolet light until a depth is reached below the cold trap. This allows ultraviolet light to destroy water between this height and the cold trap's.\n\nSo, as water rises in Venus' atmosphere and reaches this region, UV light dissociates it into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The hydrogen is much lighter than the water molecule was, and so it easily escapes Venus' atmosphere. The water will usually quickly recombine with a carbon or carbon monoxide molecule to form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. This is probably one reason why there is so much carbon dioxide in Venus
606341
It depends on whether you are talking about a planet in our solar system or an extra solar planet. I'll describe both.\n\nFor a planet in our solar system, the apparent size can be directly measured optically. One way is to take a picture of the planet through the telescope and measure the size of the picture with a ruler. Calculations based on the focal length of the telescope will tell you how many degrees (or fractions of a degree, since it will be less than 1) wide the planet appears to be in the sky for a given measured size on the photograph. Then the distance to the planet must be measured, which is not so easy. Basically it comes from triangulation to nearby asteroids combined with kepler's laws. Knowing the distance and apparent size allows you to calculate the real size and volume. To get the density, you need to know the mass. If the planet has Moons, the orbital period of the moons gives you the planet's mass from orbital mechanics calculations. If the planet has no moon, like Mercury and Venus, then theoretically their mass can be gotten from the effect their gravity has on the orbits of other planets, asteroids and comets, but this is not so accurate since those other objects don't usually pass close enough to the planet we want to measure to show much of an effect on their orbits. Fortunately we have sent space craft to Mercury and Venus and measured their mass directly by the effect their gravity had on the space craft's path.\n\nFor a planet orbiting another star, it is not so easy, because such planets cannot even be seen. Their presence is deduced from tiny Doppler shifts of the star they orbit. A planet does not just orbit a star, the star and planet orbit each other around their common center of gravity. Since the star is much heavier than the planet, it doesn't move much, but it does move, and modern instruments can measure the tiny Doppler shift in the star's light to get the motion of the star. Stellar evolution models tell us how heavy the star is and orbital mechanics tell us how heavy the planet is. (We can calculate the mass of double stars using orbital mechanics and the Doppler shift of each star's light, but we have no direct knowledge of the mass of single stars.) If the planet also happens to orbit in a plane parallel to our line of site, it will cross directly in front of the star once each orbit, like Venus sometimes crosses the face of our sun as seen from Earth. When it does, it blocks a small percentage of the star's light and the star looks slightly dimmer. If the star dims by 1%, then the disk of the planet has 1% the area of the disk of the star. Again, from stellar evolution models, we can deduce the diameter of the star and so get the diameter of the planet. (We can measure the diameter of some large, nearby stars, directly with the largest telescopes and adaptive optics, but for most stars we have no direct knowledge of their diameter.)\n\nThere is much more detail, but enough is enough, don't you think?
58273
Distance Venus to the Sun: 67 million miles or 108 million km\nSpeed of light in a vacuum: 670,616,629.4 miles per hour or 1,079,252,848.8 km per hour\n\nMinutes of travel: about 6.004
202149
Venus is the brightest object in our sky, after the sun and moon. Swirling clouds of sulphuric acid obscure Venus’s surface and inhibited study of the planet from earth until technology permitted space vehicles, outfitted with probes, to visit it. The probes determined that Venus is the hottest of the planets, with a surface temperature of about 462° C (864° F). Scientists believe a greenhouse effect causes the extreme temperature, the planet’s thick clouds and dense atmosphere trapping energy from the sun. So, Venus Have a high surface temperature.
479537
Hi! Venus in the sky is an amazing sight! Being an inner planet of the solar system, Venus is only visible for a few minutes either just before sunrise or just after sunset.\n\nThe best time to view the planet is before sunrise. You will be able to observe Venus in the east. Check your local newspaper for the timings of the sunrise. Preferably, go to a place at high elevation so that Venus is not obscured by any high buildings there may be.\n\nHope you have a good sighting of the morning star soon!
904088
PAST MISSION  LAUNCHED TO  VENUS AND ARRIVAL   \n                                                               \nMariner 2      Aug 27, 1962                          Dec 14, 1962  \nMariner 5      June 14, 1967                        Oct 19, 1967  \nMariner 10    Nov 3, 1973                           Feb 5, 1974  \nPioneer         May 20, 1978                       Dec 4, 1978  \nMagellan       May 4, 1989                          Aug 10, 1990  \n\nThe distance between Earth and Venus varies depending on where the two planets are in their orbits around the sun. So the time it takes to travel to Venus from Earth depends on the distance between the two planets at the time of launch. It also depends on the speed of the spacecraft and the path chosen.\nThe next transit of Venus occurs in June 2012.
205767
It depends on what you mean by found. Because Venus is so bright, the first caveman who went outside at dusk or dawn surely noticed it. The ancient Greeks knew enough about it to know that it was different from other "stars". Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were also known to the ancients. This probably includes among many others the Chinese, Babylonian, and early American cultures which were relatively sophisticated. \nGalileo in 1610 was first to observe that Venus had a visible disk and that it had phases like the moon so perhaps he could be considered to have discovered the modern Venus. Captain James Cook made observations of a "Transit of Venus" in 1776-1779.
669233
http://solarviews.com/\n\nAll the info about all the planets!
996835
Venus. This time of year though Venus is visible in the early morning so if you see this "star" at night rising from the east it may be Jupiter. It's quite bright as well.
92108
You should be able to see Venus in the evening or in the morning, when it will be close to the horizon where the Sun is rising/setting. This is why Venus is called either the evening or morning star. You don't need a telescope or anything to see it, it should be easily visible to the naked eye, but if you live in a city, you might not be able to see it because of light pollution.
993183
First you will need to know when it will pass over. You can see where it is now at this website.\n\nhttp://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/\n\nAt night, when the sun hits it at the right angle, the station appears as a fairly bright bluish white light. It does not flash like an airplane, and takes roughly three minutes or so to traverse the sky.\n\nIf it's bright enough you can see it with the naked eye. You may also use binoculars but you may not be able to make out any detail without a telescope (which wouldn't be easy to get a lock on the station with because it moves so fast).
11596
venus?\n\nhttp://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=Venus+%28planet%29&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1
1052164
Ask those living in other planets!
21520
Its actually not a star at all. Its the 2nd planet from our sun, Venus.\n\nYou can see it in the early morning as well.