Solar Exploration

Venus is often called Earth's twin because the two planets are almost the same size and made of similar rocky material — but the resemblance ends there. A runaway greenhouse effect has turned Venus into the hottest planet in the solar system, hotter even than Mercury despite being twice as far from the Sun. Its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps heat so effectively that surface temperatures reach around 464°C, hot enough to melt lead.

Venus also rotates backwards compared to most planets, and does so extremely slowly — a single day on Venus (243 Earth days) is longer than its year (225 Earth days). Combined with its retrograde spin, this means the Sun would appear to rise in the west and set in the east, if you could see it at all through the perpetual cloud cover.

The Venusian atmosphere is crushing — surface pressure is about 92 times that of Earth, equivalent to the pressure nearly a kilometer underwater. Dense clouds of sulfuric acid droplets blanket the planet and reflect sunlight so effectively that Venus is the brightest natural object in Earth's night sky after the Moon. Beneath those clouds lies a volcanic landscape of vast lava plains, thousands of volcanoes, and highland regions like Maxwell Montes, the tallest mountain on Venus, higher than Mount Everest.