Summary

Venus, the nearest planet, is a great disappointment through the telescope because of its impenetrable cloud cover. Mars is more tantalizing, with dark markings and polar caps. Early in the twentieth century, it was widely believed that the “canals” of Mars indicated intelligent life there. Mars has only 11% the mass of Earth, but Venus is nearly our twin in size and mass. Mars rotates in 24 hours and has seasons like Earth; Venus has a retrograde rotation period of 243 days. Both planets have been extensively explored by spacecraft.

Venus has been mapped by radar, especially with the Magellan spacecraft. Its crust consists of 75% lowland lava plains, numerous volcanic features, and many large coronae, which are the expression of subsurface volcanism. The planet has been modified by widespread tectonics driven by mantle convection, forming complex patterns of ridges and cracks and building high continental regions such as Ishtar. The surface is extraordinarily inhospitable, with pressure of 90 bars and temperature of 730 K, but several Russian Venera landers investigated it successfully.

The atmosphere of Venus is 96% CO₂. Thick clouds at altitudes of 30 to 60 kilometers are made of sulfuric acid, and a CO₂ greenhouse effect maintains the high surface temperature. Venus presumably reached its current state from more earthlike initial conditions as a result of a runaway greenhouse effect, which included the loss of large quantities of water.

Most of what we know about Mars is derived from spacecraft: highly successful orbiters, landers, and rovers. We have also been able to study a few martian rocks that reached Earth as meteorites. Mars has heavily cratered highlands in its southern hemisphere, but younger, lower volcanic plains over much of its northern half. The Tharsis bulge, as big as North America, includes several huge volcanoes; Olympus Mons is more than 20 kilometers high and 500 kilometers in diameter. The Valles Marineris canyons are tectonic features widened by erosion. Early landers revealed only barren, windswept plains, but later missions have visited places with more geological (and scenic) variety. Landing sites have been selected in part to search for evidence of past water.

The martian atmosphere has a surface pressure of less than 0.01 bar and is 95% CO₂. It has dust clouds, water clouds, and carbon dioxide (dry ice) clouds. Liquid water on the surface is not possible today, but there is subsurface permafrost at high latitudes. Seasonal polar caps are made of dry ice; the northern residual cap is water ice, whereas the southern permanent ice cap is made predominantly of water ice with a covering of carbon dioxide ice. Evidence of a very different climate in the past is found in water erosion features: both runoff channels and outflow channels, the latter carved by catastrophic floods. Our rovers, exploring ancient lakebeds and places where sedimentary rock has formed, have found evidence for extensive surface water in the past. Even more exciting are the gullies that seem to show the presence of flowing salty water on the surface today, hinting at near-surface aquifers. The Viking landers searched for martian life in 1976, with negative results, but life might have flourished long ago. We have found evidence of water on Mars, but following the water has not yet led us to life on that planet.

Earth, Venus, and Mars have diverged in their evolution from what may have been similar beginnings. We need to understand why if we are to protect the environment of Earth.