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A conjunction means two or more bodies in space passing closely
together in the sky. So in this case Venus and Mars will appear
close together - only about a finger’s width apart in the sky.
Of course in reality Venus and Mars aren’t actually close together in
space. Even during this conjunction they will still be many millions
of miles apart. But from our point of view here on Earth, they will appear
to be close together. [slate]
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You can spot Venus and Mars if you look low in the western sky
beginning about half an hour after sunset. They’ll be
closest together on July 12th and as an added bonus, you’ll be able to
see a slim crescent moon close to them too.
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NASA recently selected two new missions to Venus. These missions are called Veritas
and Davinci which is named after Renaissance artist Leonardo Davinci.
Now Veritas is going to orbit Venus to map the surface and measure
the surface and measure it’s properties in great detail. I’m a member of the Davinci team
and an exciting thing about our mission is we’re going to drop a probe into Venus
Venus’s atmosphere. That probe will take about an hour to
fall down to the surface. And while it falls, it will take thousands of
measurements of the atmosphere and snap high-resolution photographs of the
surface. All of this is going to help us understand how Venus formed and
evolved through time and whatever we discover about this mysterious
and intriguing place, well, we’re bound to be in for some surprises.
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Even though Venus is Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor there is still so much
we still don’t understand about it. The environment
of Venus is really, really extreme. This is a planet
whose surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead. And whose clouds are
made out of sulfuric acid. In fact, in the lowest part
of the atmosphere, the air is heated and pressurized to the point
that it acts more like a hot fluid than a gas. So
it’s really not a nice place that you’d want to visit. But some
scientists think that Venus may have been more like Earth in the past.
There’s clues in the atmosphere and on the surface that’s hinting that Venus
may once have been more hospitable. So we scientists really
want to understand if that’s true, and if so what happened
to change the environment on Venus so drastically.
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If you want to learn more about Venus and the other worlds of our solar system, you can visit
solarsystem.nasa.gov.