The Trouble with Venus

Abstract

Venus is the closest planet. Its surface has never been seen at optical frequencies; nevertheless we now know with at least fair reliability, and in some cases with remarkable accuracy, its surface temperature and pressure, its atmospheric structure, its period of rotation, the obliquity of its rotation axis, the mean surface dielectric constant, its ionospheric structure, and even a little about its surface topography. And yet the clouds of Venus, visible to the naked eye and known to be clouds since the time of Lomonsov, continue to elude our efforts to understand them comprehensively. Not only do we disagree on the chemical composition of the clouds, but it is not even settled whether they are condensation clouds or non-condensable aerosols. And yet there is a very wide variety of relevant data on the clouds. Indeed, the ratio of potentially diagnostic data points to mutually exclusive hypotheses is of the order unity.