"NARRATOR:" "Everyone likes a vacation in a warm climate, but how about a trip to two planets that are as hot as hell?" "DAVID 7AIGE:" "If you were walking on the surface of Mercury you would need one heck of a spacesuit." "NARRATOR:" "Mysterious Mercury appears lifeless and desolate." "But hidden deep inside is a clue to a different past." "SEAN SOLOMON:" "The smallest planet made out of densest stuff, with the most Iunar-Iike landscape at its surface." "And yet generating a magnetic field." "NARRATOR:" "But it's nearby Venus, goddess of love, who will really melt your heart and crush your defenses at the same time." "MIKHAIL MAROV:" "So this is a hell." "A real hell!" "NARRATOR:" "Once the twin of Earth, something went wrong here, terribly wrong." "ELLEN STOFAN:" "At some point Venus had an ocean's worth of water that is now gone." "NARRATOR:" "What turned Venus from paradise to pressure cooker?" "could this really be our future?" "DAVID GRINS7OON:" "The ultimate fate of the Earth is to look" "like Venus looks today." "NARRATOR:" "And here, on our own doorstep, there is possibly the greatest survival story of all." "KEVIN BAINES:" "There is some speculation that Venus might actually still harbor life, even though it is such a hostile place." "NARRATOR:" "There has never been a better time to boldly go where no human has gone before." "To follow in the footsteps of our robot pioneers and visit the planets of the solar System." "NARRATOR:" "Ever wanted to be an astronaut?" "Imagine it was you who was heading to the Hot Zone of the two inner planets." "Where would you go?" "What would you see?" "And how would you survive?" "The latest robotic missions have revealed more about these worlds than ever before." "Armed with this new knowledge, think of this as your personal travel guide to our near neighbors." "NARRATOR:" "As the planet closest to the Sun," "Mercury is the ultimate summer vacation." "Step out of your spacecraft and sizzling temperatures are guaranteed... for a day that lasts three months." "And when the Sun finally does set, the nightlife begins - with a unique cosmic light show." "This is one pockmarked planet worth taking a closer look at." "Like our Moon, Mercury is covered in craters." "BRETT DENEVI:" "You can't look at the Moon or Mercury without seeing impact craters." "NARRATOR:" "It's a good thing Brett Denevi loves a big impact." "As a member of the imaging team on the current Messenger Mission to Mercury, she sees a Iot of them." "BRETT DENEVI:" "What's exciting for me is I get to be one of the first people to see these images of places on the planet that we've never seen before." "NARRATOR:" "Most people come here to Meteor Crater in Arizona to see a big hole in the ground." "Brett's desires run deeper." "BRETT DENEVI:" "If you want to study impact craters on Mercury this is the best place to come." "I mean, this is the most well preserved impact crater on Earth." "It's the closest you're going to get." "NARRATOR:" "Wonder what it wouId be like to take a stroll on Mercury?" "You can walk around Meteor Crater in about an hour." "But on Mercury you wouldn't know when to stop." "Craters here stretch as far as the eye can see." "although no human has ever set foot on Mercury, we have a pretty good idea of what you would see." "MISSION CONTROL:" "We copy you down, eagle." "SEAN SOLOMON:" "If you were walking around on the surface of" "Mercury it wouId look, outwardly, a Iot like the Moon." "NARRATOR:" "When you step onto Mercury, you step into a world with no real atmosphere;" "where the sky is as black as night and ablaze in sunshine." "And where a drive is an off-road trek through at Ieast a three billion year-oId battlefield." "BRETT DENEVI:" "Big craters, small craters, craters everywhere." "So that's your first impression looking at it." "NARRATOR:" "Like the Moon, Mercury took most of its battering early on." "A silent witness to the dawn of time, it's been undisturbed by a single drop of rain or breath of wind ever since." "DAVID 7AIGE:" "For the most part the surface of Mercury has been frozen in time for periods of billions of years." "And you may say, 'That's boring', but not necessarily." "It's a good thing because these planets such as Mercury and the" "Moon preserve a record of what was going on during this critical early period of the solar System's formation." "And so we can basically study it there, because it's laying right on the surface." "NARRATOR:" "Every stone and crater of this pockmarked world has the potential to gaze back four-and-a-haIf billion years" "But counting these craters is just the first challenge when it comes to revealing a planet like Mercury." "BRETT DENEVI:" "It's always low on the horizon so it's hard to point a telescope at it from Earth." "It's hard to get into orbit around Mercury because it's so close to the Sun." "NARRATOR:" "For that reason, Mercury remains one of the most under explored planets in our solar System." "Many aspects, Iike its geological past, are a mystery." "But some things we do know:" "this lonely planet has a strange sense of keeping time." "NARRATOR:" "Once you arrive, you'II have to reset your watch for a time zone like no other." "BRETT DENEVI:" "It has such an unusual orbit and rotation period, the days and nights are very strange." "NARRATOR:" "A Mercurian year is just 88 Earth days long, thanks to its quick sprint around the Sun." "But it rotates so slowly, a single day takes much longer." "BRETT DENEVI:" "The day on Mercury is more like haIf-a-year on Earth's terms." "NARRATOR:" "although known to us since ancient times, for thousands of years we had little idea of what the planet really looked like." "NARRATOR:" "Then in 1 e74, NASA's Mariner 1 e sends back the first ever glimpses of its surface." "NEWSREEL NARRATION: 7ictures can be transmitted to tracking stations and onto the Jet propulsion Laboratory in" "california." "MARK ROBINSON:" "But due to Mercury's slow rotation and its elliptical orbit around the Sun, when it flew by three times it saw the same half of the planet." "So we've really only seen something like 47 percent of the planet at relatively low resolution." "NARRATOR:" "Hidden in these fuzzy black and white postcards for over 30 years, are clues that point to one of Mercury's biggest puzzles:" "it's been shrinking." "MARK ROBINSON:" "Mercury doesn't have plate tectonics" "like the Earth does." "So we know that Mercury's crust is under a Iot of compression." "And the only way you can really do that is if the planet shrank." "And so you can think of it as the 'incredible" "Shrinking planet'." "NARRATOR:" "As Mariner 1 0 files past, the mystery deepens." "The spacecraft detects a vast iron core, hidden inside." "BRETT DENEVI:" "Mercury's core makes up about 60 percent of the planet by mass." "It's about twice as big as Earth's." "Why would it have such a huge core for such a small planet?" "Some people think there was a huge impact that happened that kind of stripped off a Iot of the planet." "And now what we're seeing is just the remnant of a once bigger planet." "NARRATOR:" "Many questions about Mercury remain unanswered, questions a new mission will hopefully solve." "MISSION CONTROL:" "Five, four, three, main engine start, two, one and zero and lift off of Messenger on NASA's mission to" "Mercury." "NARRATOR:" "NASA's Messenger spacecraft will become the first probe to orbit Mercury." "SEAN SOLOMON:" "Getting a spacecraft into orbit around" "Mercury is difficult for two reasons: the Sun and the Sun." "The Sun as a source of heat and the Sun as a source of gravity." "NARRATOR:" "To sneak past the Sun, Messenger is taking a convoluted route, flying past the Earth once," "Venus twice and Mercury itself three times, to arrive in fulltime orbit by e01 1 ." "MARK ROBINSON:" "When you go into orbit you can end up mapping the whole planet at fairly high resolution." "So we will start having a mature and fundamental understanding of" "Mercury, not only its surface, but its whole chemistry throughout the whole planet." "From that we can unravel, to some degree, how it formed." "NARRATOR:" "What other secrets are etched into Mercury's ancient surface?" "already, Messenger has sent back some curious clues." "Arriving at Mercury?" "There's a list of natural wonders to see." "And even a dazzling light show." "After Messenger's three flybys, we've now mapped more than e0 percent of the planet." "Taken from around 1e4 miles, these images are the clearest to date of Mercury." "And it's not hard to spot a crater of epic proportions - the result of yet another titanic collision." "BRETT DENEVI:" "That's the CaIoris Basin, this impact basin." "It covers almost three million square kilometers." "It's one of the biggest in the solar System." "NARRATOR:" "The size of alaska and california combined, whatever created CaIoris almost destroyed the planet." "MARK ROBINSON:" "It was something in the order of a hundred kilometers in size." "It could have been a huge comet or it could have been a very" "large asteroid." "It had a catastrophic effect on the surface." "NARRATOR:" "Shockwaves rippIed around the crust, buckling it on the opposite side." "SPIDER IMAGES." "NARRATOR:" "And near the center of the crater, is another spectacular geological puzzle -- that has the experts scratching their heads." "BRETT DENEVI:" "The Spider is this really strange feature that's in almost the center of the CaIoris Basin." "MARK ROBINSON:" "Oh, The Spider." "That really annoys me when I hear people call it that 'cause it doesn't look like a spider." "How many legs does a spider have?" "Eight, right?" "BRETT DENEVI:" "It looks kind of like a 1 00-Iegged spider." "But it has all of these radiating cracks coming out of it." "NARRATOR:" "Whether The Spider is the result of planetary stretch marks, or some obscure cratering process, no one knows." "MARK ROBINSON:" "It's a fascinating feature." "We don't know how it formed." "It's very tantalizing." "NARRATOR:" "So, for a planet that appears inactive, more has been going on deep inside Mercury than we ever gave it credit for." "There's even more occurring above the surface that can't be seen." "And it involves the relentless force of the Sun." "NARRATOR:" "Like Mercury, the Earth takes a beating from the" "Sun's violent temper." "NARRATOR:" "flares, sun storms and other solar hissy fits can cause electronic mayhem for the satellites that roam above our heads." "NARRATOR:" "fortunately, the Earth is protected from this radiation by a magnetic shield, a kind of force field generated by our molten iron core." "JAMES SLAVIN:" "planetary magnetic fields shield planets, their surfaces and their atmospheres from charged particles that are always coming off the Sun." "NARRATOR:" "The auroras that light up our polar skies are evidence of our protective shield at work." "Without it, life would not exist here." "Visit Mercury and you'II be visiting the only other planet in the inner solar System with a magnetic field." "But its very existence defies explanation." "JAMES SLAVIN:" "Now the mystery there is that in order to have a magnetic field, you need to have an interior to the planet that is at Ieast partially molten." "Mercury, one of the smallest of the planets, would have been expected to really have frozen all the way through." "And yet we have a relatively strong, very well defined magnetic field that appears to have a source that's located deep in the planet." "NARRATOR:" "Whatever mechanism is driving Mercury's magnetic field, its too weak to protect it from the full force of the Sun." "The solar Wind buffets Mercury's thin atmosphere." "And in the process, it puts on a light show." "RON VERVACK:" "The reason you'd want to go to Mercury as a travel destination would be this night-side view, because it's going to be highly unique in the solar System." "You have sodium atoms that are streaming off and giving off this yellow light." "And so you can almost look as if you're standing in a doughnut of sodium emission." "NARRATOR:" "With the sunrise three months away, you'II have plenty of time to sit back and take in the view, framed in a halo of amber light." "RON VERVACK:" "In some sense you can get a very nice light show." "And I know people go to Canada to look at the Northern Lights all the time." "And so that would be a reason to go to Mercury." "NARRATOR:" "Not a night owl?" "Then head into the light." "But when you're this close to a stellar rotisserie, make sure you pack plenty of sunscreen." "NARRATOR:" "If you want a suntan, you can't beat the dusty sands of Mercury." "Stretch out on the ground here and the Sun crackIes and fizzes right above you, appearing almost three times bigger in the sky and seven times as hot." "DAVID PAIGE:" "If you were walking on the surface of Mercury you would need one heck of a space suit." "Because if you were in the Sun it wouId be extremely hot." "You would see an enormous Sun in the sky that would just burn you to death if you spent any time in it whatsoever." "NARRATOR:" "The mercury really climbs on Mercury - to a toasty 840 degrees Fahrenheit." "That's about twice as hot as your kitchen oven on full heat." "JAMES SLAVIN:" "At such high temperatures you have a" "liquid metals." "NARRATOR:" "You'II need a bit more than SPF 30 sunscreen here." "NARRATOR:" "To escape the heat, you can always head to the dark side." "But dress warmly." "With virtually no atmosphere to keep the heat in, the temperature plummets to minus e77 degrees Fahrenheit." "And it's here in the freezer that Messenger will encounter another puzzle:" "Can ice exist on a planet so close to the Sun?" "DAVID PAIGE:" "It was only when the first radar observations of the surface of Mercury were obtained back in the 'nineties that it was discovered that Mercury in fact had what appeared to be polar caps in these first radar images." "NARRATOR:" "Some corners of Mercury's polar craters are in permanent shadow." "Here, on the most Sun-baked planet of all, water seems to survive frozen in eternal darkness." "DAVID PAIGE:" "The ice is contained in places where" "literally the Sun never shines." "And so the ice is sequestered in these dark interiors of craters at the high latitude regions." "NARRATOR:" "We found the same thing on our Moon." "In late e00e, the LCROSS mission crashed a probe into a deeply shadowed crater, confirming ice hidden near the lunar south pole." "Where did it come from?" "A comet?" "DAVID PAIGE:" "It's very interesting because we believe that the water in the Earth, in its atmosphere, in the oceans and even below the surface probably came from a similar source." "And so part of the mystery of Mercury is to try to find out where the water came from and maybe that might help us find out where the water on Earth came from." "Mercury." "But how about a robot ..." "In e01 1 , when Messenger arrives in orbit, imagine this tough little spacecraft circling a lonely planet, a very long way from home." "NARRATOR:" "Move away from the Sun and you'd expect things to cool down a little." "NARRATOR:" "Venus: the picture of coolness and calm." "AII pale, beguiling and cloaked by clouds." "But the planet of love is shrouded in mystery." "Drop beneath her treacherous veil at your own risk." "NARRATOR:" "planning a vacation to Venus?" "Nothing is as it should be here, on our twisted, alien twin." "NARRATOR:" "Beneath the clouds is the only planet in the solar" "System to rotate backwards." "And it does so very slowly." "NARRATOR:" "The Sun, if you could see it, rises in the west and sets in the east." "An entire day here lasts for eight Earth months, which is longer than the Venusian year." "KEVIN BAINES:" "On Venus you can walk around the planet faster than the planet rotates." "NARRATOR:" "The sky above is as heavy as it looks " "loaded with C0e." "ELLEN STOFAN:" "Venus' cloud cover is mostly made of carbon dioxide." "And on the Earth we have the same amount, but it's tied up in rocks like Iimestones, it's tied up in reefs." "On Venus, all that carbon dioxide is in the air." "CGI:" "BIRTH OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM." "NARRATOR:" "It's the differences between these worlds that are so intriguing." "That's because four-and-a-haIf billion years ago," "Venus and Earth started out as planetary twins." "MARK BULLOCK:" "They were formed right next to each other, they are very close to each other in the solar System, they have similar sizes." "DAVID GRINSPOON:" "Not only that, we now know the planets were exchanging material early on." "Bits of Earth were falling on Venus, and bits of Venus were falling on Earth." "So if life started on any of these worlds, it may well have spread among them through these little chips getting knocked off from all the impacts that were happening then, all the big collisions." "SCI-FI NARRATOR:" "You are there!" "The most exciting, nerve shattering journey in the history of man!" "NARRATOR:" "Fifty years ago, it was easy for us to imagine" "Venus, closer to the Sun and wrapped in clouds, to be our scorched, tropical sister, swarming with life." "DAVID GRINSPOON:" "There was this picture of Venus as a primitive steamy Earth, complete with giant tree ferns and dinosaurs." "MIKHAIL MAROV:" "altogether, it seemed to us that it should be, just possibly, even a populated world." "NARRATOR:" "In the late 1 e70s, the Space Race begins." "while America aims for the Moon, Russia sets its sights on meeting the neighbors." "MIKHAIL MAROV:" "Venus and Mars still was in the human dreams to meet the species which could be very similar to us." "Venus was even easier than Mars to reach." "NARRATOR:" "But landing on Venus proves surprisingly difficult." "One-by-one, the Soviet Venera probes disappear within the thick Venusian atmosphere, their last transmissions warning of a world of inconceivabIy high temperatures and pressure." "NARRATOR:" "Persistence and tough Russian engineering eventually pay off." "In 1 e77, the camera on the redesigned Venera Nine finally penetrates the Venusian veil." "NARRATOR:" "But what it sees is nothing like the tropical paradise imagined." "NARRATOR:" "This is the first ever picture taken from the surface of another planet." "MIKHAIL MAROV:" "And for the first time it was returned black and white panoramas of the Venus surface." "These images were so extremely important." "Because for the first time we, human beings, had a chance to see with our naked eyes completely different other world." "We were very much proud of that." "NARRATOR:" "Seven years later, Veneras 1 3 and 14 send back the first color postcards taken under Venusian skies." "MIKHAIL MAROV:" "It means that standing on the surface of Venus you will meet absolutely incredible situation." "First of all, you will see not the blue skies." "You will see red skies, orange in color." "MIKHAIL MAROV:" "This is a hell." "A real hell!" "NARRATOR: 'hell' is a good description." "This is what it's like to enter the Venusian underworld;" "a volcanic landscape ruled by crushing pressure and searing heat." "No probe survives here for much more than a few hours." "And none have ever returned." "NARRATOR:" "What happened to our twin world?" "Was Venus always as barren and hostile as it appears to be?" "ELLEN STOFAN:" "One of the most intriguing things about Venus is that we know that at one point in Venus' history, it had an ocean like the one we have here on Earth." "There have been chemicals measured in the atmosphere that tell you that at some point Venus had an ocean's worth of water that is now gone." "MISSION CONTROL:" "atlantis, Houston." "Everything down here looks real good to us." "NARRATOR:" "Where did all the water on Venus go?" "And what else lies hidden under her veil?" "MISSION CONTROL:" "Five, four, three, two, one." "We have ignition and Iift-off of atlantis." "NARRATOR:" "In 1 e8e, the space shuttle atlantis launches the" "magellan probe toward Venus." "MISSION CONTROL VOICE #1 :" "Roger, roll atlantis." "NARRATOR:" "After a journey of 1 7 months," "magellan uses radar eyes to peer through the clouds from orbit." "NARRATOR:" "Watching from Earth is ellen Stofan." "ELLEN STOFAN:" "When you have that ability to pick up an image and say, 'I am one of the first three people," "I am one of the first five people to ever look at this piece of ground on another planet.'" "It's such a sense of awe and a sense of discovery." "NARRATOR:" "magellan's radar strips away the thick clouds." "For the first time ever, we see all of Venus laid bare." "NARRATOR:" "welcome to IavaIand!" "ELLEN STOFAN:" "There are volcanoes of all sizes." "From a kilometer across to hundreds of kilometers across." "And in that sense it's not all that different from some areas on the Earth." "But on the other hand, it's of course this dry world with no vegetation at all." "NARRATOR:" "It's the sheer number of volcanoes that sets Venus apart." "This is a world that has been tortured by fire." "Over 1600 giant volcanoes puncture its surface." "It's possible some are still active." "MARK BULLOCK:" "If we could just hover like this over Venus it wouId probably look a Iot like this." "NARRATOR:" "Mark bullock enjoys spending time on Venus, at Ieast the version he finds here on Earth." "MARK BULLOCK:" "Hawaii has some of the most spectacular shield volcanoes that are very similar to the volcanoes that we see on" "Venus." "NARRATOR:" "The huge, gentIy-sIoped volcanoes of" "Hawaii may be impressive." "On Venus there are at Ieast 1 70 ranging from this size to ten times larger." "NARRATOR:" "But the observant visitor may notice that Venus is missing something." "ELLEN STOFAN:" "The whole impact crater situation on Venus is really very puzzling." "CGI:" "MORE EXPLORATION." "MARK BULLOCK:" "With the magellan images, we see really a small number of impact craters." "And it's such a small number, it's about a thousand." "Because we know the rate of which impactors come in, we can actually date the surface to somewhere between 300 million and one billion years old." "NARRATOR:" "Sometime in the recent geological past, it seems the entire surface of Venus was remodelled - and suddenly." "KEVIN BAINES:" "The surface geology of Venus is different than the Earth, basically because a lack of water." "Water is not Iubricating that crust." "So you don't get plate tectonics." "Instead what seems to happen is that forces inside the planet are trying to move things around." "But it can't, it's locked." "And then it explodes, very massive, globally explosive episodes that happen about every haIf-a-biIIion to a billion years." "KEVIN BAINES:" "So you would not want to be on Venus when that happens." "Because once something gives way the whole planet might just basically explode in a sense and turn itself over in a very short amount of time in geological terms." "HAWAII" " MARK BULLOCK FLYING OVER RIVER OF FIRE." "MARK BULLOCK:" "Oh Man, look at this!" "We can see a river of lava beneath the surface." "Imagine that this lava is on Venus." "probably something very much like this occurs either today or in the recent past." "NARRATOR:" "No one can say for sure if we'II ever see an eruption like this on Venus." "No one has been able to get this close!" "MARK BULLOCK:" "One of the really exciting and high-IeveI scientific interest, is whether Venus is geologically active today." "Because there are reasons to think that the clouds on Venus only exist because there is on going geologic activity." "So this is one of the big secrets of Venus, it's something that we want to find out." "NARRATOR:" "In recent years, finding the source of Venus' thick atmosphere has become surprisingly relevant for all of us down here on Earth." "MARK BULLOCK:" "half a million tonnes of sulphur dioxide spewed into the atmosphere every year." "KEVIN BAINES:" "The whole Greenhouse Effect was not really recognised as a significant effect to influence planetary climates until we went to Venus and found that instead of being e0 degrees Fahrenheit it was e00 degrees Fahrenheit." "And we said, 'Whoa, what's wrong with this?" "Let's learn about this.'" "And it taught us about the Greenhouse Effect." "NARRATOR:" "Ever wondered how alien a planet could be?" "How bad a climate can get?" "Try the planet next door." "NARRATOR:" "The best way to experience Venus is to hitch an imaginary ride on a Soviet Venera probe." "MARK BULLOCK:" "well, it wouId be a wild ride." "NARRATOR:" "The clouds start about 40 miles up, some five times higher than the Earth's." "KEVIN BAINES:" "What are those clouds made out of?" "They're not made out of water, they're made out of a completely difference substance." "They are made out of sulphuric acid." "Everywhere you go the atmosphere is going to try to eat you away." "NARRATOR:" "As you get deeper, things heat up." "The thickening atmosphere allows the Sun's heat in, but not out." "It's also getting dense." "So dense, your probe drops like a coin in water." "MARK BULLOCK:" "And as we descended we would gradually, the surface would gradually appear to us as if, as if you were approaching the bottom of the ocean." "NARRATOR:" "congratulations, you've arrived on the hottest surface in the solar System!" "Here the official temperature is 870 degrees Fahrenheit." "Day or night, equator or pole, the searing heat never varies more than a few degrees." "And it's why we have so few snapshots from the Venusian surface." "DAVID GRINSPOON:" "So why is it so hard to bring scientific instruments to the surface of Venus?" "What about an ordinary camera?" "There's plenty of light there." "Why not just send a camera and take pictures?" "I've got my NASA-issued spacesuit here, my special Venus suit." "And let's take this camera and send it to Venus and see what happens." "MARK BULLOCK:" "primarily, you don't want to melt." "It's such a hot environment that all the electronics, all the power, all the communications have to be very rugged." "DAVID GRINSPOON:" "Oh, that's cool, though!" "MARK BULLOCK:" "Anything mechanical, anything electronic is just an enormous challenge to have it function on the surface." "NARRATOR:" "And it's not just the heat that you have to bear." "AII that sky above is really heavy, pressing in at around e0 times the pressure on Earth." "ELLEN STOFAN:" "When I was a graduate student we use to all get in a conversations about what would get you first, the temperature or the pressure?" "It would be pretty simultaneous, I think." "NARRATOR:" "To descend to the surface of Venus is the same as diving over half a mile underwater." "PHIL NUYTTEN:" "It's an enormous pressure, enormous, crushing pressure." "How do you make things that can withstand, how do things turn and move under those huge outside pressures?" "well, that's what the armour of technology is all about." "PHIL NUYTTEN:" "The Exosuit, using composite fibre, strong aluminium alloys and stainless and titanium and all these things." "It looks like something out of 'Transformers' or out of a comic book." "That's the same kind of suit that you'd need on the surface of Venus." "NARRATOR:" "You'd never guess the dangers on the ground from orbit." "NARRATOR:" "Except maybe for this:" "massive doubIe-barreIIed storms hovering above the poles." "KEVIN BAINES:" "These, what we call 'dipole features', twirling around." "We don't know really what they are." "But the whole feature itself is only a thousand or two kilometers across, it's not very big." "But it does have a figure-eight type of look to it." "LATEST ESA ANIMATIONS OF VENUS ATMOSPHERE." "NARRATOR:" "believed to be created by winds that roar around the equator at speeds up to e30 miles per hour, these hurricanes can split into three and even four." "And the wild weather doesn't end there." "Because the hottest planet in the solar System even has snow... but not as we know it." "ELLEN STOFAN:" "AII of a sudden in the radar images, all the mountains go white." "Now that's because there is some kind of highly reflective coating." "It wouldn't look white to your eyes if you could actually land on the surface of Venus, it might look shiny." "Because we actually think it might be some sort of metallic coating, almost like a pirate or a fool's gold." "So something sparkly, which to me is even better than looking at snow." "NARRATOR:" "These are just some of the puzzles that the European" "Space Agency's, Venus Express, now in orbit, is hoping to solve." "NARRATOR:" "As we begin to understand how carbon dioxide controls our climate, there's never been a better time to" "learn lessons from our neighbor." "HAKAN SVEDHEM:" "What we're trying to solve now with this very, very dense atmosphere, very complex weather patterns, with the new data from Venus Express we are really learning by mapping out in three dimensions how the atmosphere behaves." "NARRATOR:" "Unprotected by a magnetic shield," "Venus is still being robbed of precious water." "NARRATOR:" "Venus Express has seen how the solar Wind eats away at the atmosphere." "HAKAN SVEDHEM:" "And we can see that even today that actually water is still escaping in the form of oxygen and hydrogen." "And that's an indication that there has been water on Venus in the past." "NARRATOR:" "Despite all this scientific effort, we still don't know what triggered Venus' diabolical transformation." "ELLEN STOFAN:" "people debate over whether Venus ever had a moon." "If Venus had a satellite at one point, could that satellite eventually have impacted onto the surface and caused some catastrophe to happen?" "We don't know." "It could have been possibly a factor." "NARRATOR:" "Perhaps such an impact explains both the strange calendar and climate on Venus." "Was it hit hard enough to flip upside down?" "And for its day to be slowed to a crawl?" "Was this the moment Venus' climate was thrown into chaos?" "Whatever the cause of Venus' climate calamity, could life have ever survived such an ordeal?" "DAVID GRINSPOON:" "If I had to guess, or I had to bet," "I would say, 'Yeah, Venus did havea life'." "And I say that because what we do understand about life on" "Earth is that it started early and doesn't seem to have required any extraordinary conditions." "DAVID GRINSPOON:" "If there was life of our kind, the organic kind, on the surface of Venus a Iong time ago, then what happened to that life?" "well one possibility is that it just died out." "But there's another possibility that's a little more exotic, which is that it may have migrated up into the clouds." "KEVIN BAINES:" "There is some speculation that Venus might actually still harbor life even though it is such a hostile place." "And the reasoning is that, 'well gee, at one time Venus was like the Earth in the first two billion years or so of its history'." "So if life were to grab a hold, maybe life was able to stay ahead of the environmental disaster that befell Venus as the water basically left the planet." "NARRATOR:" "could life really exist in the clouds of Venus?" "NARRATOR:" "The best way to know for sure is to float into the atmosphere and find out." "KEVIN BAINES:" "Right behind us is the valor balloon which we intend to fly in the skies of Venus in a couple of years from now." "BALLOONS." "NARRATOR:" "valor will be tackling the acid clouds of Venus with a" "little help from frying pan technology." "KEVIN BAINES:" "There's been two other balloons, already launched to Venus in the mid-1 e80s." "These were the Vega missions." "There were two separate balloons that the Russians put into the atmosphere." "And one thing they knew to do is put teflon on that whole balloon, and the balloons worked perfectly for two days just as designed." "And so we know that teflon works." "NARRATOR:" "battling violent updrafts and acid clouds, these non-stick pioneers were swept nearly halfway round the planet." "Kevin expects valor to go further." "KEVIN BAINES:" "We will circumnavigate the planet, that is fly around the world of Venus, not just once but up to five times." "And if we do that, if we accomplish that, we will by far have the world's record, actually it's the universal record, for flight in the skies of any planet, anywhere." "NARRATOR:" "Under-expIored and unbelievably alien, the Hot Zone planets are finally being recognized as prime space travel destinations." "NARRATOR:" "Mercury: a planet that's both freezer and furnace." "BRETT DENEVI:" "As a geologist, if I couId just bring back one rock, one sample." "I mean, that would increase our knowledge of Mercury by tenfold or something." "MARK ROBINSON:" "I'd Iike to go to these polar craters and figure out what is it." "NARRATOR:" "And Venus, our unfortunate twin sister." "MARK BULLOCK:" "What we'd Iike to do is explore the regions that haven't been explored before." "And so I would pick alpha Regio here." "That's probably the first place I would go." "KEVIN BAINES:" "I would love to go and see those snow-fiIIed mountain peaks with metallic snow and see if we can figure out what's going on there." "Maybe some new sports that can be created, sliding down those metallic snows?" "DAVID GRINSPOON:" "And then of course there's the future story and what's going to happen to Earth in the distant future." "And that's another reason we are really interested in Venus." "Because the ultimate fate of the Earth is to look like" "Venus looks today." "NARRATOR:" "Venus and Mercury: two planets of wonder but trapped in their own alien heIIs." "Perhaps not obvious destinations to discover more about our home planet, but that's the beauty of traveling the solar System;" "it's just full of surprises." "AtZLIT 2010"