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EU spacecraft aiming to unravel Venus' mysteries

Tomorrow morning, mission controllers in the European Space Agency's operations center in Darmstadt will put the finishing touches to a space mission in the ultimate neighbor from hell.

They will transmit a series of radio commands to a robot spacecraft currently hurtling towards the Sun. Its rocket engine will fire for 50 minutes as it passes Venus, slowing the craft down so that it can be captured by the planet's gravitational field. Once in orbit, the wardrobe-sized probe -- Venus Express -- will then study the planet's acid clouds, searing heat, crushingly dense atmosphere and hurricanes to find out why Earth's nearest neighbor has become a place of insufferable heat and poison.

"Venus is very like Earth in that it is the same size and has an orbit round the Sun close to ours," said David Southwood, head of science at the ESA. "Yet Venus went wrong. We did not. We want to find out why Venus became our evil twin."

Venus and Earth are almost identical in size. In addition, both orbit the Sun in the so-called "Goldilocks zone," a swath of space in which conditions are considered by astronomers as being not too hot and not too cold to prevent the evolution of life. In other words, Venus should make ideal planetary real estate.

Yet it is the solar system's most inhospitable planet.

"It's very disturbing that we do not understand the climate on a planet that is so much like the Earth," said Professor Fred Taylor, a planetary scientist based at Oxford University and one of the ESA's chief advisers for the Venus Express mission. "It is telling us that we really don't understand the Earth. We have ended up with a lot of mysteries."

However, such puzzles are recent. Throughout history, Venus has simply been seen as the heavenly embodiment of a deity. Intriguingly, this was invariably a female one. For example, the Babylonians, Ancient Greeks and Romans all linked it with their goddesses of love.

Venus was later revealed to be a planet, one that was assumed to be more or less the same as Earth. Only its permanent cloud covering prevented astronomers from working out the details of these similarities. Even in the 1950s, popular science books depicted a mist-shrouded world either of deserts or of swamps and ferns. A few more fanciful versions had dinosaur-like creatures lumbering about in the background.

Then the first robot spacecraft -- built by Russia and the US -- reached Venus and sent back data that astounded astronomers. The planet was unbelievably hot, dense and had virtually no oxygen.

Russia tried landing probes on the surface. All were crushed flat by the atmosphere's incredible pressure.

Earth's sister was also found to have a surface temperature of 450oC and a covering of thick clouds of sulphuric acid. As a vision of Hades, it could hardly be beaten.
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