On this day in 1975, the Soviet spacecraft Venera 9 landed on Venus. It was the first successful landing on another planet. Venus holds a special fascination for me — similar to what I see others have in Mars. To some extent, it is the idea that Venus seems to me a more reasonable planet for terraforming. I’m not saying that it would be easy. But in theory, you could get rid of the carbon-dioxide. It could easily hold onto oxygen and nitrogen, if you got the temperature down. I’m still waiting for someone to explain how Mars is ever going to have a thick enough atmosphere. Just the same, the lack of a decent magnetic field is a problem. But it is on Mars too.

But mostly, I’m fascinated by Venus because it is so horrible. That picture at the top was taken by Venera 9. It was the first ever taken of the surface of Venus. And it looks kind of Earth like. At the same time, we know that those rocks are hotter than a pizza oven: 860°F. And the pressure was almost a hundred times what it is on the surface of the earth — roughly equivalent to being a half mile under the ocean. It also has a lot of sulfur in the atmophere. That is a picture of hell!

And we went there. Those crazy Ruskies actually landed on the surface! The primary purpose of the lander was not the surface, however. The mission scientists were interested in the atmosphere. It found clouds that were over 20 miles thick. And it measured such lovely chemicals in the atmosphere as hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid. Breaking Bad fans will remember this latter as what was always used to dispose of bodies. It doesn’t actually work that way, but as I recall from chemistry class, long-term exposure will destroy your bones, as it moves through soft tissue. Which is a good deal more horrific. But also something that makes Venus that much more cool!

Supposedly, on this day in 1879, Thomas Edison got his first electric light bulb working. According to James Burke, it wasn’t him but his team of assistants. I don’t know or particularly care. The truth is that I’ve never been that fond of him, because by the time I was old enough to think anything, I learned all about his battle with George Westinghouse. America was going to get electrified and the question was whether we were going to use direct current (which Edison owned all the patents to) or alternating current (which Westinghouse owned all the patents to). So there was a battle between the two men.

That would be fine under most circumstances: two rich men trying to game the system to become even more rich. But the truth is that direct current is terrible for transmitting electricity over even modest distances, much less long distances. This isn’t open to debate. But Edison worked incredibly hard to foist a totally inappropriate technology on this nation in the name of more wealth for himself. Remember: this is long after the light bulb. Edison had a ridiculous number of patents and the wealth that went along with that. His fight with Westinghouse should never have occurred.

This something I don’t think is mentioned enough: our business leaders are profoundly anti-American. I’m okay with that. I think America should be a free country. But we should be aware of this. And we should call out conservatives most especially for all their claptrap about loving this country when all they want to do is funnel our shared resources to these amoral business interests.

Anyway, let me end with a little Bob’s Burgers live performance of “Electric Love.” This was a song that Gene wrote during the show for Louise’s science fair project about Edison’s electrocution of Topsy the elephant in his continued efforts to show that alternating current was dangerous. It was one of a great many animals he did this to. Of course, given various states have done the same thing to humans, maybe it isn’t that big a deal. Humans are horrible. Thomas Edison was a human. Therefore Thomas Edison was horrible.

If you want to listen to the song from the episode: Bobs Burger’s Electric Love.

On this day in 1994, the Magellan spacecraft stopped transmitting after four years. It had two primary goals: map the surface and gravitational field of the toxic cloud covered planet. Venus is in many ways like Earth. It is almost exactly the same size and density. They both seem to have a similar internal structures. They are both losing heat at the same rate. Yet, as Carl Sagan put it: earth is like heaven and Venus is like hell.

Venus’ surface pressure is almost a hundred times the surface pressure here on earth. Standing on the surface of Venus would be like being a half mile under the ocean. You know: deadly. But it’s worse than that, because it is also incredibly hot. It is 860°F, which is, you know, hotter than any regular kitchen oven. In fact, it is even hotter than the hottest pizza ovens. Venus is very, very hot. In fact, it is hotter than Mercury at noon, even though Venus only gets 25% as much energy from the sun.

The reason for this is because almost 97% of Venus’ atmosphere is composed of carbon-dioxide. This creates the mother of all greenhouse effects. This fact combines with two other aspects of Venus to create a very constant temperature: almost no axial tilt (just 3° compared to 23.5° for Earth) and almost a circular orbit around the sun (eccentricity of 0.007 compared to 0.017 for the Earth). So day, night, pole, or equator, Venus is just too hot even for cooking pizzas. But the temperature does decrease with altitude. So on top of Maxwell Montes — the highest point on Venus at 7 miles — it is only about 700°F. And you know what that means: great pizza oven temperature! (Fun fact: there may be lead sulfide “snow” on top of Maxwell Montes!)

The Magellan mission made a number of discoveries about Venus. For example, it found that the surface was young. It is covered with volcanic material. It appears to have river-like lava flows. It is also geologically active, but doesn’t seem to have plate tectonics. And there is little evidence of wind erosion. Now this is actually something I know a little bit about. First, Venus rotates very slowly (and in the wrong direction), so not much in the way of Coriolis effect. And there are no temperature gradients, so not much mixing due to that. So the atmosphere is very static.

But in September 1994, NASA announced that it was ending Magellan because its solar arrays were decaying and all the mission objectives had been met. So they put it into a gradually decaying orbit. On 11 October, it was down to roughly 85 miles above the surface of Venus. The atmosphere was thick enough at that height to cause the solar arrays to to heat up to 260°F. Two days later, Magellan went around the far side of Venus, and we never heard back. Most of it burned up, but it is assumed that parts of it crashed landed on the surface. Farewell, Magellan!

Much of this article is taken from, Anniversary Post: Magellan.

On this day in 1604, Kepler’s Supernova was first observed. It wouldn’t be noticed by Johannes Kepler until a week later, but he observed it for a year and published a book about it. It’s an important event because it was the last time a supernova was observed in our galaxy. (We observe them in other galaxies.) And that’s really interesting if you consider that just 32 years earlier, Kepler’s colleague Tycho Brahe had observed another supernova. So two supernovas in a small span of time, and then nothing for over 400 years. But that’s the way random events are.

In general, a supernova would have to be closer than 100 light-years from the Earth to have an effect on us. Statistically, we should have one within 33 light-years every 250 million years. That’s one of the things about us being out here on the edge of the galaxy: it’s kind of boring. But it is probably also necessary for the development of advanced life. Further in, life on the Earth would have likely been destroyed before it got too far.

Kepler’s Supernova is thought to have been something on the order of 20,000 light years away. The one Brahe observed was less than half that distance. Still, these supernovas were far, far away — where they belong.

On this day in 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft transmitted the first ever pictures of the far side of the Moon. I thought we might take this opportunity to discuss why it is that the same side of the Moon is always facing us. Although I should tell you that this is not exactly true. I think we are able to see about 55% of the Moon’s surface, because it jiggles. But for all intents and purposes, we see the same moon each night. This is because it is tidally locked.

The Moon once rotated rapidly. But over time, the Earth’s gravitational field slowed it. The force from the Earth produces a bulge in the part of the moon that is directly facing the Earth — and also directly opposite (just like the Moon created tides on Earth). This has the effect of squishing down the sides, so that the moon looks like a football with the pointy end facing Earth. Of course, the deformation isn’t anywhere near that great. But that’s the basic idea.

While the Moon was spinning fast, the bulge was always slightly after the direct line. As a result, the gravitational field had a net torque on the Moon, slowing its rotation. The effect was very small. But it’s amazing what you can accomplish in a billion years. I used to tell my students to image the Moon (or any other tidally locked object like Mercury) as if it were a frying plan. The handle would always be facing just a little off center from the Earth, and would thus be constantly pulled slightly in the opposite direction of the Moon’s rotation.

Luna 3 was the first mission specifically meant to photograph the other side of the Moon. Luna 1, sent in January of that year, was meant to crash on the Moon. It missed. (Don’t laugh: we missed the Moon the first time we tried.) And it became the first human object to go into orbit around the Sun. Luna 2, sent in September, actually hit the Moon. Later, in February 1966, Luna 9 would be the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon (or any other place).

The radio signal on Luna 3 was so weak, that the spacecraft had to get almost all the way back to Earth in order to transmit its 18 images. The one above is the first transmitted back. I think we humans have become far too cavalier about this kind of stuff. What we now do in space is mind boggling. It’s always nice to go back five or six decades and see what we were doing and just how hard it was. Oh, and no one knows for sure what happened to Luna 3. But it probably burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

On this day in 1995 — 20 years ago — Bellerophon (51 Pegasi b) was discovered. It was the first planet discovered to be orbiting around a Sun like star — 51 Pegasi. It was the second exoplanet ever discovered. And it is quite a planet, which destroyed some theories about solar system formation. It is a very big planet: roughly half the mass of Jupiter. But it is really close to 51 Pegasi — just 0.05 AU, which is six times closer than Mercury is to the Sun. The year on Bellerophon is four Earth days long.

Bellerophon was discovered the way that about half of all exoplanets have been discovered: with Doppler spectroscopy. I put the animation above (courtesy of Zhatt at Wikipedia) so that you would see how this works. As I’ve discussed before, Jupiter doesn’t actually orbit around the Sun; it orbits around the center of mass of it and the Sun (forget the rest of the solar system for now). But as a result, the Sun also orbits around the center of mass of the solar system.

As a result of Jupiter, the Sun wobbles — changing speed by about 12 m/s over the course of one Jupiter orbit (12 years). Since the 1990s, we’ve had equipment capable of detecting Jupiter if we were observing from another solar system. In the case of 51 Pegasi, the wobble was much greater: 70 m/s. But in the early 2000s, new systems were installed that could detect wobbles as small as 0.3 m/s. And soon, we should have systems that can detect wobbles of just 0.1 m/s. That last one is important because the Earth induces a 0.1 m/s wobble in the Sun. It’s very exciting.

On this day in 2004, SpaceShipOne took its last, fastest, and highest flight into space. It was the first commercial aircraft to fly in space. It was designed by Burt Rutan for his company Scaled Composites. He’s an amazing guy. But the truth is that I only really know about him because I used to work for a real estate company that did most of its investing in the California desert where the company is located.

I’ve long wondered why it is that Elon Musk is such a big name in the world of high tech but Rutan isn’t. And then I realized: Musk is a billionaire. It’s not about tech. I never thought much of Musk. Other than a couple of successful — but hardly innovating — companies, what has the world gotten from him: talk. But this is America and “when you’re rich, they think you really know!” It’s a shame. And a sham.

But Rutan is the real deal. And he doubtless has a better life. He’s been able to do what he loves. Musk shows all the signs of needing the accolades he receives. He’s another Steve Jobs. And those who read me often will know that I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Update 4 October 2015 7:13 pm

David Nichols mentioned in the comments that “A Satisfied Mind” would would be appropriate here. I quite agree. But we’ll go with Porter Wagoner’s popular version instead of Cash’s: