Venus is the Earth-that-could-have-been and the Earth-that-still-might-be.  Our so called sister planet orbits second from the Sun. Cloudy, hot, and unhospitable to life as we know it, Venus demonstrates as well as Mars why comparative planetary science can greatly improve understanding of our own planet.

The greenhouse effect on Venus results in a poorly understood phenomena called zonal super-rotation. Hurricane winds across the cloud tops help the atmosphere to rotate much faster than the planet itself, but these winds give way to barely a breeze at the surface. The atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide with some nitrogen. Thick sulfur dioxide clouds and other particulates conspire to hide the surface. The USSR visited the surface of Venus with several landers, some that included cameras, while orbiters with radar equipment accomplished global surface mapping last decade by orbiters. Mountains, volcanoes, pancake domes, plains, channels, and a impact craters have been discovered on the surface. The surface appears to be geologically young, despite little evidence for plate tectonics, the process on the Earth that recycles old crust and exudes new crust. The youthfulness of the Venusian surface may be due to catastrophic upheavals that periodically see the crust overturned (this might have last occurred from 300 to 500 million years ago).

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