Venus

spectrum in which a phosphine absorption line would be expected did not detect phosphine. By late October 2020, re-analysis of data with a proper subtraction of background did not show a statistically significant detection of phosphine.

Members of the team around Greaves, are working as part of a project by the MIT to send with the rocket and launch company Rocket Lab the first private interplanetary space craft, to look for organics by entering the atmosphere of Venus with a probe, set to launch in January 2025.

### Planetary protection

The Committee on Space Research is a scientific organization established by the International Council for Science. Among their responsibilities is the development of recommendations for avoiding interplanetary contamination. For this purpose, space missions are categorized into five groups. Due to the harsh surface environment of Venus, Venus has been under the planetary protection category two. This indicates that there is only a remote chance that spacecraft-borne contamination could compromise investigations.

## Human presence

Main article: List of missions to Venus

Venus is the place of the first interplanetary human presence, mediated through robotic missions, with the first successful landings on another planet and extraterrestrial body other than the Moon. Currently in orbit is Akatsuki, and other probes routinely use Venus for gravity assist maneuvers capturing some data about Venus on the way.

The only nation that has sent lander probes to the surface of Venus has been the Soviet Union, which has been used by Russian officials to call Venus a "Russian planet".

### Crewed flight

Studies of routes for crewed missions to Mars have since the 1960s proposed opposition missions instead of direct conjunction missions with Venus gravity assist flybys, demonstrating that they should be quicker and safer missions to Mars, with better return or abort flight windows, and less or the same amount of radiation exposure from the flight as direct Mars flights.

Early in the space age the Soviet Union and the United States proposed the TMK-MAVR and Manned Venus flyby crewed flyby missions to Venus, though they were never realized.

### Habitation

See also: Colonization of Venus and Floating cities and islands in fiction § Venus
link=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA\_Cloud\_City\_on\_Venus.jpg|alt=|thumb|Artist's rendering of a NASA High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) crewed floating outpost on Venus
While the surface conditions of Venus are inhospitable, the atmospheric pressure, temperature, or solar and cosmic radiation 50 km above the surface are similar to those at Earth's surface. With this in mind, Soviet engineer Sergey Zhitomirskiy (Сергей Житомирский, 1929–2004) in 1971 and NASA aerospace engineer Geoffrey A. Landis in 2003 suggested the use of aerostats for crewed exploration and possibly for permanent "floating cities" in the Venusian atmosphere, an alternative to the popular idea of living on planetary surfaces such as Mars. Among the many engineering challenges for any human presence in the atmosphere of Venus are the corrosive amounts of sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.

NASA's High Altitude Venus Operational Concept is a mission concept that proposed a crewed aerostat design.

## In culture

Main article: Venus in culture
link=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van\_Gogh\_-\_Starry\_Night\_-\_Google\_Art\_Project.jpg|alt=|thumb|Venus is portrayed just to the right of the large cypress tree in Vincent van Gogh's 1889 painting *The Starry Night*.
Venus is a primary feature of the night sky, and so has been of remarkable importance in mythology, astrology and fiction throughout history and in different cultures.

The English name of Venus was originally the ancient Roman name for it. Romans named Venus after their goddess of love, who in turn was based on the ancient Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, who was herself based on the similar Sumerian religion goddess Inanna (which is Ishtar in Akkadian religion), all of whom were associated with the planet. The weekday of the planet and these goddesses is Friday, named after the Germanic goddess Frigg, who has been associated with the Roman goddess Venus.
link=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kudurru\_Melishipak\_Louvre\_Sb23\_n02.jpg|alt=|thumb|The eight-pointed star a symbol used in some cultures for Venus, and sometimes combined into a star and crescent arrangement. Here the eight pointed star is the Star of Ishtar, the Babylonian Venus goddess, alongside the solar disk of her brother Shamash and the crescent moon of their father Sin on a boundary stone of Meli-Shipak II, dating to the twelfth century BC.
Several hymns praise Inanna in her role as the goddess of the planet Venus. Theology professor Jeffrey Cooley has argued that, in many myths, Inanna's movements may correspond with the movements of the planet Venus in the sky. The discontinuous movements of Venus relate to both mythology as well as Inanna's dual nature. In *Inanna's Descent to the Underworld*, unlike any other deity, Inanna is able to descend into the netherworld and return to the heavens. The planet Venus appears to make a similar descent, setting in the West and then rising again in the East. An introductory hymn describes Inanna leaving the heavens and heading for *Kur*, what could be presumed to be, the mountains, replicating the rising and setting of Inanna to the West. In *Inanna and Shukaletuda* and *Inanna's Descent into the Underworld* appear to parallel the motion of the planet Venus. In *Inanna and Shukaletuda*, Shukaletuda is described as scanning the heavens in search of Inanna, possibly searching the eastern and western horizons. In the same myth, while searching for her attacker, Inanna herself makes several movements that correspond with the movements of Venus in the sky.

The Ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks possibly knew by the secon millenium BC or at the latest by the Late Period, under mesopotamian influence that the morning star and an evening star were one and the same. The Egyptians knew the morning star as *Tioumoutiri* and the evening star as *Ouaiti*. They depicted Venus at first as a phoenix or heron (see Bennu), calling it "the crosser" or "star with crosses", associating it with Osiris, and later depicting it two-headed with human or falco heads, and associated it with Horus, son of Isis (which during the even later Hellenistic period was together with Hathor identified with Aphrodite). The Greeks used the names *Phōsphoros* (Φωσϕόρος), meaning "light-bringer" (whence the element phosphorus; alternately *Ēōsphoros* (Ἠωσϕόρος), meaning "dawn-bringer"), for the morning star, and *Hesperos* (Ἕσπερος), meaning "Western one", for the evening star, both children of dawn Eos and therefore grandchildren of Aphrodite. Though by the Roman era they were recognized as one celestial object, known as "the star of Venus", the traditional two Greek names continued to be used, though usually translated to Latin as *Lūcifer* and *Vesper*.

Classical poets such as Homer, Sappho, Ovid and Virgil spoke of the star and its light. Poets such as William Blake, Robert Frost, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Wordsworth wrote odes to it.

In India Shukra Graha ("the planet Shukra") is named after the powerful saint Shukra. *Shukra* which is used in Indian Vedic astrology means "clear, pure" or "brightness, clearness" in Sanskrit. One of the nine Navagraha, it is held to affect wealth, pleasure and reproduction; it was the son of Bhrgu, preceptor of the Daityas, and guru of the Asuras. The word *Shukra* is also associated with semen, or generation.

Venus is known as Kejora in Indonesian and Malaysian Malay.

In Chinese the planet is called Jīn-xīng (金星), the golden planet of the metal element. Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese cultures refer to the planet literally as the "metal star" (金星), based on the Five elements.

The Maya considered Venus to be the most important celestial body after the Sun and Moon. They called it *Chac ek*, or *Noh Ek*', "the Great Star". The cycles of Venus were important to their calendar and were described in some of their books such as *Maya Codex of Mexico* and *Dresden Codex.*

### Modern culture

See also: Venus in fiction

With the invention of the telescope, the idea that Venus was a physical world and possible destination began to take form.

The impenetrable Venusian cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface; all the more so when early observations showed that not only was it similar in size to Earth, it possessed a substantial atmosphere. Closer to the Sun than Earth, the planet was frequently depicted as warmer, but still habitable by humans. The genre reached its peak between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when science had revealed some aspects of Venus, but not yet the harsh reality of its surface conditions. Findings from the first missions to Venus showed the reality to be quite different and brought this particular genre to an end. As scientific knowledge of Venus advanced, science fiction authors tried to keep pace, particularly by conjecturing human attempts to terraform Venus.