Why does NASA give so much attention to Mars, but so little to Venus?

NEGI RK Friday, January 22, 2021

Why does NASA give so much attention to Mars, but so little to Venus?

Both planets are equally hard to get to, with either one needing a very similar delta V budget, but Mars has several major advantages compared to Venus.

Venus is pressure cooker of a planet with surface temperatures averaging 462°C and an atmospheric pressure of 92 Bar.

The hellish conditions are not helped by the fact that 96.5% of the air is CO2, and is subject to sporadic rains of corrosive sulfuric acid. The Venusian day is 243 Earth days long which is actually longer that its year. Any mission to the planet has to be able to function in conditions that are normally found inside a high pressure lead smelter.

Now look at Mars, compared to Venus it’s Club Med. The surface temperatures can get up to 35°C at the equator in a summer’s day (Mars has an axial tilt and seasons just like Earth). The day is very close to Earth’s at 24 hours and 37 minutes and the planet has vast reserves of water and even polar ice caps.

Now it’s not all beer and skittles on Mars however; the atmosphere is less than 1% the density as ours, meaning that solar and cosmic radiation saturates the surface and the gravitational force is 38% of Earth. The average temperature on the surface is still a rather chilly -63°C thanks to its thin atmosphere which is mostly CO2 (96%).

There are ways that a few little “home improvements” can be done, such as establishing an artificial magnetic shield that will not only stop solar radiation, but allow the atmosphere to thicken up over time, killing two birds with the one stone.

Combine that with extra atmospheric thickening effects that can be done by redirecting icy asteroids into aerobraking impacts for the impatient among us.

This will not only add water and oxygen (some of the water will disassociate during atmospheric entry into oxygen and hydrogen, with the H2 being lost back to space), but will add valuable heat to the planet and assist with melting the Martian permafrost.

Eventually the endgame is to end up with something like this.