Venus' Omen

Some hot times on earth?

As Carl Sagan likes to point out, our planetary neighbor Venus seems less the goddess of love than the incarnation of hell. Wrapped in a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere with clouds of sulfuric acid, it is a Dantesque world where surface temperatures reach a lead-melting 900DEG F and atmospheric pressures are 90 times greater than those on earth. In so grim an environment no life could exist.

Yet because Venus is such an inferno, the heavenly goddess has held a special fascination for scientists. Why, they wonder, has a planet so close to earth and so like it in size and density evolved into a world so vastly different and hostile? Last week at a conference sponsored by NASA'S Ames Research Center, they provided new insights into Venus--and some warnings about the earth's own future.

Much of their information comes from an unmanned Pioneer spacecraft. Since it began orbiting Venus three years ago, it has studied the planet's weather by photographing changing cloud patterns and lifted its veil with a radar beacon, mapping 93% of Venus' shrouded surface. Though the planet has continent-size land masses topped by a mountain a mile higher than Everest, it does not seem to be rent by the earth's major mountain builder: continental drift. Rather, the key tectonic process appears to be volcanism, accompanied by lightning, flows of lava and an otherworldly version of earthquakes.

Still, as dissimilar as Venus is from earth, scientists see its history as a cautionary tale. They warn that if carbon dioxide continues to build up in the earth's atmosphere as rapidly as it has in the past few decades from burning wood and fossil fuels, the atmosphere will become increasingly like that of Venus. Sunlight will still beat down through the atmosphere, but the CO2 will block heat from radiating back into space, raising global temperatures, melting polar ice and flooding coastal cities.

Says NASA'S James Pollack, a planetary scientist: "It's a very real possibility."

Since Venus provides a planet-size lab for studying such a calamity, scientists want more missions to the planet.

But Administration budget cutters may scuttle the next Venus flight. The Soviets, who have made Venus a major target of study, should help. They have just sent off two more probes. Both are expected to land on the scorching surface and scoop up samples for quick chemical analysis, radioing back their findings in the hour or so before the ships expire in the Venusian hothouse.

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