Yeah.
Venus has a few really big challenges.
The surface temperature is like 900 degrees Fahrenheit,
which is about even with a professional wood fired pizza oven.
And the pressure is crushing at 90 times what we have on Earth.
So we need to protect our delicate science instruments from that.
They're not going to be able to survive that environment.
So instead, we're taking essentially the science package from the Curiosity
rover and sealing it up inside a 500 pound titanium sphere.
It's about three foot diameter,
and that'll protect it from the temperature and the pressure.
And then we go send that sphere skydiving through Venus.
We'll take all of our measurements on the way down.
We'll take us about an hour to fall from the top of the atmosphere down
to the surface.
We have to take those
measurements as they're happening and transmit them up to a relay.
And then we will smack the surface at 30 miles an hour.
Sure.
I'm one of the engineers in charge
of figuring out how to go take these measurements at the right time
to get the scientists what they need and to guarantee that we get the data
sent out before we have our up close and personal encounter with the surface.
So that means a lot of working with the scientists
and the engineers and optimizing what our descent looks like
to get the best return for this really one shot event
to make this work.
So during the actual descent, during that hour, we're going
to get a little bit of live data, but we can't talk to the probe at that point.
It's busy doing running its canned sequence of events.
And so we're all going to be sitting around in the operations center.
Some of us have been working on these this mission for ten years or more,
and we're just going to be waiting for a stream of data to come back
to say whether this work, to see what we've learned.
And by the time we get any of that data,
the is already dead on the surface.
So that'll be a really tense but exciting moment.
Will be a great kind of capstone to to a decade or more of working
on this project
for So Earth and Venus have a lot in common.
They're similar size.
They're both rocky planets and Venus is our neighbor.
They're just one planet closer to the sun than Earth is.
But their atmosphere is just really punishing.
By the time you get to the surface, it's a 900 degree atmosphere.
That's the same as a wood fired pizza oven.
It's a crushing 90 atmospheres of pressure.
And that's about the same pressure you get at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
It's always cloudy on Venus.
It's the clouds are really thick
and hard to see through, which makes it hard to study from orbit.
And those clouds happen to mostly be sulfuric acid.
So they have a habit of trying to eat away
a lot of materials if you're going to put them through the atmosphere.
So all in all, it's it's a little bit earth like, but it's a horrible place to be.