Inner Solar System

There are many among us who remember a time when the surface features of the inner planets, also called terrestrial planets, were known only from blurry, earthbound-telescopic images. In barely more than four decades, that changed dramatically. Now, data and images from orbiting spacecraft and landers have revealed new and unanticipated features of the inner planets that, to use the words of Galileo (1623), “ought to have opened the mind’s eye much room for admirable speculation”. While space-exploration technology has burgeoned over the past four decades, curiously, understanding the myriad observations and data has posed a serious challenge for planetary investigators. Instead of understanding observations from a framework of discoveries that are securely anchored to the properties and behavior of matter, planetary investigators became accustomed to make computational models based upon assumptions, and to ignore advances that contradict ‘consensus favored’ models, especially, a model of the internal composition of Earth that had its origin circa 1940 and the so-called ‘standard model of solar system formation’ that dates from the 1960s. Decades of model proliferation (Raymond et al. 2014) from these beginnings has led to, again the words of Galileo, “dark and confused labyrinths”, virtually devoid of logical, causally-related understanding.

Understanding how the solar system evolved has been one of the driving reasons for exploring the solar system until recently. Now the focus includes planets around other stars and particularly terrestrial planets and habitability. Mercury and Venus are two extreme members in our solar system but are poorly understood. Our closest planetary neighbors, with their proximity to the sun made it challenging to learn much about them from telescopes, as they are accessible for only a short time before sunrise or after sunset for large telescopes (due to scattered light and sensitive detectors). Venus with it global cloud cover made it impossible to learn about its surface, until new advances in radar and microwave techniques. Only partly surveyed by Mariner 10 from three fly-bys during 1974–1976, Mercury remained enigmatic until MESSENGER. By contrast, Venus has been explored from fly-by spacecraft, orbiters, entry probes and landers and even balloons, yet the major science questions have only become sharper. MESSENGER and Venus Express, the two current spacecraft visitors from Earth to the innermost, entered the final phase of their mission lives in summer 2014 as the fuel required for orbit maintenance was depleted. Orbiting Venus since 15 April 2006, Venus Express conducted an aerobraking experiment in June 2014. It collected its last observations on 27 November 2014 when the fuel was exhausted during orbit raise maneuvers, and the spacecraft entered the atmosphere on 18 January 2015. Over more than eight years of observing Venus from its 24 h, polar elliptic orbit, it collected a large amount of data from its operating instruments which have provided new insights into the atmosphere of Venus and to a limited extent, its surface. The MESSENGER spacecraft also observed Venus on its third fly-by of Venus which also yielded some new results.

Mercury is the smallest among the planets of our solar system. Its diameter is only about 2/5 of that of the Earth, about 4880 km. Even some moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Ganymede and Titan, are bigger. Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun and named after the roman God of dealers and thieves.

Access to the chemical constituents, and dynamics of the atmosphere and surface of Venus has long been a primary goal and challenge of robotic exploration.

Planetary observations of Mercury started in the mid 70s with the Mariner 10 mission. The three flybys of Mariner 10 with Mercury in 1974 and 1975 discovered the existence of a strong Hermean magnetic field and an active magnetosphere surrounding the planet.

The remarkable results obtained by the pioneering Deep Space 1 (DS1) mission (Rayman et al. 2000) have demonstrated the practical possibility of using electric thrusters to successfully perform interplanetary robotic missions.

Mercury is the smallest and closest to the Sun of the eight planets in the Solar System. It has an orbital period of about 88 Earth days. Seen from Earth, it appears to move around its orbit in about 116 days, which is much faster than any other planet.

Increasingly, NASA is launching missions with in situ exploration objectives that are aimed at planets in the solar system with extreme ambient conditions including very high temperatures.

Venus is considered to be Earth’s sister planet hence we can learn a lot about Earth by investigating Venus tectonics, volcanism, and atmosphere. As opposed to Mars which lost most of its atmosphere but retained a lot of water, Venus has extremely dense and hot, carbon dioxide atmosphere (95 % CO₂, >90 atm pressure, and ~480 °C temperature) and lost most of its water. One day Earth could end up looking just like Venus or Mars. Mars has been mapped by multitudes of spacecraft and we learn more about that planet each year. In comparison, understanding of Venus is relatively poor. The science objectives for Venus exploration are expressed in various reports by the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (Vexag 2014).

Venus, the second planet from the Sun, has always fascinated mankind. One of the reasons for this is that Venus can be seen particularly well shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset, as it is the second-brightest natural object in the night sky after the Moon.

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines, to make electrical power, windmills for mechanical power, wind pumps for water pumping or drainage, or sails to propel ships.

Proximity to the Sun and long night periods are distinct disadvantages for photovoltaic power generation on Mercury and Venus. However solar panels are providing uninterrupted power for the Messenger space craft (Mercury flyby) and Venus Express space craft (polar orbiter) for the past ten years (Solomon et al. 2001; Dakermanji et al. 2006).

The Venus atmosphere is very different from the Earth atmosphere. One has different composition (CO₂), very high pressure (up 92 atm) and very high temperature (up 462 °C).

The exploration of space has been at the forefront of scientific thought and discovery for the last half century. Beginning with the first Sputnik satellite in 1957 to the Curiosity landing and the other numerous ongoing missions of today, mankind is setting its sights away from Earth.

“Venus, the “greenhouse planet”, is scientifically fascinating place.” (Landis G, NASA). Based on the fact of growing interest in Venus exploration, backed by the US National Academies of Sciences’ listing of the Earth’s “hellish twin” as one of the mission destinations with high priority, exploration mission architectures for Venus are expected to respond to operational expectations that are higher than the early period of Venus missions. High profile missions point out the need for more capable, more flexible, better designs.

Missions to Venus have been launched starting with the year 1961 and a total of 38 missions have been so far launched covering a range of mission scenarios including fly-by, orbiting and atmospheric and landing probes.

The Earth’s magnetic field is shaped roughly as a magnetic dipole, with the poles currently located proximate to the planet’s geographic poles. At the equator of the magnetic field, the magnetic field strength at the planet’s surface is 3.05 × 10⁻⁵ T, with global magnetic dipole moment of 7.91 × 10¹⁵ T m³.

The idea of considering business opportunities within the inner solar system is clearly speculative. However, the danger with most speculative opportunities is not being ahead of your time, but failing to recognize that virtually all such possibilities may be realized in time. The inner solar system is inherently more challenging in terms of prospective business activity than the Moon, Mars, or even asteroids.

Let us review the known conditions on Mercury, and shortly on Mars, because we will compare them.

What role will Mercury play once Humanity becomes a space faring race and establishes a civilization that spans the solar system? It could become the industrial center of such a civilization because of its light gravity, material resources, and plentiful solar energy that can be concentrated to achieve very high temperatures or converted into almost unlimited quantities of electrical energy.

In previous essays [1‐4] author showed the basis of the Universe: Time, Matter, Charge, Distance (dimensions), Volume, is energy. Energy may be positive and negative. All particles are only different forms; collections of energy units.

I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because humanity would be extinct [1].