Sulphuric Acid and Old Volcanic Plains

* The planet Venus is the second from the sun, the third brightest object in the sky next to the sun and moon and is named after the Roman God of Love and Beauty.
* It orbits the sun at nearly twice the distance of Mercury.
* We can see references to the planet Venus as far back as 1600 BCE, and in fact, many ancient cultures perceived Venus as two separate stars that they would often call the “morning star” and “evening star,” or by the Greek names Phosphorus and Hesperus.
* It was the mathematician Pythagorus who first recognized that they were both the same celestial body, so he is occasionally deemed the “discoverer” of Venus, despite its previous incorporation into ancient Astronomy.
* Venus is often called Earth’s “sister” planet, as both are terrestrial planets, and they hold many similarities in size, gravity, composition, and other characteristics.
* Venus is slightly smaller and has about four-fifths the mass of Earth.
* It is thought that Venus may have once had large reserves of water, but none of that now remains.
* The surface of the planet is characterized by having approximately 80% of its surface covered with volcanic plains and exhibits signs of once experiencing intense volcanism, though most are currently inactive.
* The atmosphere of Venus consists of approximately 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen, though there are also traces of other elements and compounds, such as carbon monoxide, argon, helium, and neon.
* This composition makes the atmospheric pressure more than 90 times heavier than that of Earth. Closest to the surface of Venus is a thick layer of carbon dioxide.
* Over this layer there are layers of clouds of sulfuric acid which reflect over 90% of the sunlight that hits Venus and obscure most Muggle attempts to view the planet. This highly reflective nature of Venus’s clouds is one reason, as well as its close proximity to our own planet, that it is one of the brightest objects in our sky.
* It is the hottest planet in the solar system, despite being so much further from the Sun than Mercury.
* It is theorized that Venus once had a climate similar to Earth’s, but runaway greenhouses gas effects permanently impacted its climate.
* The temperatures on Venus can range from -364 to 870 degrees Fahrenheit.
* To date, Muggle space agencies have deployed more than twenty spacecrafts to view and orbit Venus.
* In 1962 it became the first planet to be observed by a passing Muggle spacecraft when Muggle space agency NASA’s Mariner 2 passed within 21,600 of the it.
* NASA was also responsible for mapping 98% of the planet with radar when they sent the Magellan to orbit Venus.
* Venus’s rotation orbits in the opposite direction (or “retrograde”) from most other planets in the solar system.
* One clockwise rotation - or one day - on Venus takes 243 Earth days, making it also the most slowly rotating planet in the solar system.
* One day on Venus is therefore just slightly longer than a Venusian year, as the planet takes 224.7 Earth days to orbit the sun.
* Its orbital pattern is also closer to a true circle than any of the other planets, whose path tends to be more elliptical in nature.