1 An Alternate View of Venus

Overwhelming physical evidence has been present for twenty-five years that Venus is a hot new planet, which we maintain resulted from the high velocity impact (> 10 43 ergs) on Jupiter about 6,000 years ago. Up-welling radiation measurements from five independent Pioneer Venus probes all agree that Venus is radiating 250 times more energy than the Earth. The interior is completely molten with a tenuous crust less than a kilometer thick floating on top. Venus’ enormous internal heat is manifested by raw lava lying in myriads of cracks on the surface and the high velocity jetting of sulfur gases (primarily S8) from some two hundred thousand ‘small domes,’ to an altitude of 48 km. The S8 molecule, the stable form of sulfur at temperatures in the lower atmosphere, was not detected because its mass was beyond the range of the Pioneer Venus instruments. The surface temperature is maintained at 450 C by the evaporation of raining sulfur. The altitude of the ubiquitous lower cloud layer corresponds to the exact temperatures at which the rising S8 freezes to form monoclinic and rhombic crystals, which comprise it. It is the great mass of sulfur suspended in the lower atmosphere (Hadesphere) which produces the high surface pressure, not CO2. CS also crystalizes from the rising gases at 31 km and catalyzes reactions which capture carbon. This caused the dropout of CO2 and CO between 31 and 50 km, currently attributed to ‘a clogging of the mass spectrometer input leak(s).’ We maintain that the dominant gas in the lower atmosphere is S8, not CO2, and there is no ‘runaway greenhouse effect.’ The great mass of upward jetting gases is what drives the ‘four day’ zonal winds which encircle the planet at all latitudes, for which there is currently no viable hypothesis. Background The currently accepted paradigm assumes that the terrestrial planets accreted from refractory particles in the inner solar system some 4.7 billion years ago. Adherence to this hypothesis results in a failure to explain almost every unique aspect of the planet Venus, among them: the slow retrograde rotation; the near resonant spin-orbit coupling with earth; the high, uniform surface temperature and pressure; the super-rotation of its atmosphere; the surplus energy which it radiates; its lack of a magnetic field; the totally volcanic surface; the uniform planetwide cloud and haze layers; the illumination level at the surface; the high deuterium to hydrogen ratio; and the near-total malfunction of the sensor systems on all the Pioneer Venus probes as they descended through altitudes of 12 to 14 kilometers. Our scenario provides answers to all of these