Latest news with #Venera
National Geographic
a day ago
- Science
- National Geographic
Venus, explained
Quadruple Conjunction The moon, Venus, Mars, and the star Spica appear in a quadruple conjunction as seen from Azul, Argentina. From its scorching temperatures to its oddball rotation, there's a lot to learn about the second planet from the sun. On September 14, 2020, scientists announced the possible detection of phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus. It's too early to say what's creating the gas, but if the result is confirmed, one possibility is that it was made by microbial life floating in the planet's thick atmosphere. Find out more about the tantalizing, if controversial, finding here. The first spacecraft to set mechanical feet on another planet landed on Venus. In the 1960s and '70s, the former Soviet Union's Venera probes plunged through the planet's punishing atmosphere, with a handful even sending back data from its rocky surface. In December 1970, for instance, the Venera 8 lander transmitted atmospheric data for more than 50 minutes after its turbulent touchdown. These early missions provided an important lesson: Venus is like a massive pressure cooker. Although the planet is the second closest planet to the sun, it's by far the hottest of the eight worlds in our solar system. Its thick atmosphere is mostly made of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid, which traps the sun's heat and creates a runaway greenhouse effect. Thanks to this atmospheric blanket, temperatures on Venus' surface can soar over 880 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to melt lead. The surface pressure is around 90 times that on Earth, which would feel like standing under about a half a mile of water. Wintertime doesn't even provide a reprieve from the heat. With an axial tilt of three degrees, Venus has just one season: hot. The only planet named after a female figure, Venus is a celestial oddball. Though its rocks are shades of grey, its atmosphere imparts an eerie orange glow to the landscape. Together with Mercury, it's one of the few planets in our solar system without a moon. And like Uranus, it turns on its axis in the opposite direction to the rest of our celestial family. Due to this retrograde rotation, if you were to stand on Venus' surface, the sun would rise in the West and set in the East. But don't count on catching many Venusian sunsets; the planet turns stunningly slow. A single day there takes 243 Earth days—longer than a Venusian year, which lasts 225 Earth days. And because the planet rotates in the opposite direction as its orbit, 117 Earth days pass between each sunrise and sunset. Hellish Earth twin Despite the strange and scorching conditions, Venus shares a surprising number of features with Earth. Measuring 7,520 miles across, Venus is roughly the same diameter as our home planet. It also has a similar structure, sporting a rocky surface and an iron core, although the planet doesn't rotate fast enough to generate an Earth-like magnetic field. Thousands of volcanoes dot Venus' surface, some of which may still be active. Volcanic rock from cooled lava covers most of its surface—the oldest of which dates back some 500 million years. Many mountains also rise into Venusian skies. Its largest, dubbed Maxwell Montes, stands 36,000 feet tall. The processes driving the formation of this network of formations is unusual, however. Venus doesn't appear to harbor a churning seismic engine like that on Earth, which drives our bumper-car network of tectonic plates. Yet the planet does appear to have a spidery network of breaks in its surface, hinting at an entirely new type of plate tectonics. Scientists suspect that for up to two billion years after it formed, the planet may have even been habitable—harboring liquid oceans on its surface. Fascination with what drove that transition from happy to hellish has led many scientists to campaign for more robotic visits to Venus. Light bringer Venus' dense cloud cover has benefits for us Earthlings. It reflects the sun's rays, making the planet the brightest in the night sky. It's often called the morning star or evening star because its bright, steady glow persists either around sunrise or sunset. Ancient peoples spotted these dazzling points in the sky and believed them to be two different objects, one that glows in the morning and another that glows in the evening. Similar to Mercury, Venus can occasionally be seen making a lazy trip across the sun's face, known as a transit. But while Mercury zips across the sun every 13 to 14 years, Venus transits are much more rare. The planet's orbit is almost a perfect circle but is slightly tipped relative to Earth's path around our star. This means it's incredibly hard for the sun, Venus, and Earth to align in the right way. The last time a transit of Venus happened was in 2012, and it won't happen again until 2117. Magazine for all ages starting at $25/year
Associated Press
27-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
What are the Key Security Measures you require in a Cloud-Based Video QC System?
05/27/2025, New York City, New York // KISS PR Brand Story PressWire // Given the time, cost, and efforts that go into content creation, protecting your content in cloud storage is a necessity. Cloud ensures flexibility and scalability, but, at the same time, usher in the security concerns that must be addressed. Enforcing robust security measures in cloud video QC workflows is necessary to safeguard your content from breaches, unauthorised access, maintain compliance, and ensure a seamless workflow. In this article, we'll explore the key security measures essential for cloud video QC to prevent breaches and unauthorised access, and maintain integrity. Why is security important in cloud video QC? Here are the key reasons: Key Security Measures in Cloud Video QC It is the foundation of cloud security to protect data from unauthorized access. access. If the content is moved from its primary location, it should be converted into a secure format, so even if the data is accessed, it can't be read without a decryption key. Cloud video QC solutions implement both in-transit and at-rest encryption. In-transit encryption protects data during transfer between your storage location and the cloud QC servers. At-rest encryption ensures security of the data stored on cloud QC servers. Venera's QC solutions, Quasar and CapMate provide end-to-end encryption to ensure an added layer of content security for their customers. You can't let anyone in your cloud QC company access your content on the cloud. So, you must implement stringent access controls in your video QC software, which include: These security measures prevent unauthorized personnel from accessing content during the QC process. To maintain security and ensure legal compliance, cloud video QC providers must adhere to industry regulations, like ISO, SOC2, GDPR, CCPA, FTR and others. SOC2 compliance is relevant for SaaS and cloud service providers to assure their customers about their content security. It focuses on five key principles: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Similarly, if your content is on AWS, you can ensure its security with their Foundational Technical Review (FTR) that enables you to identify and rectify any risks in your cloud QC solutions. Adhering to these security and compliance standards instils confidence among media companies that rely on cloud video QC solutions. Continuous security monitoring by the cloud QC solution provider is vital to identifying and mitigating potential threats before they escalate. Best practices include: By conducting periodic security assessments, cloud video QC providers can proactively address potential risks and strengthen system defences. Conclusion As the trend of media workflows moving to the cloud gains momentum, security of cloud-based video QC software becomes the top priority. Encryption, access controls, and compliance are key features that greatly boost content security. Regular security audits and sophisticated tracking mechanisms also guarantee that media assets are safe from leaks, breaches, and cyber attacks. By implementing these main security features, cloud video QC providers can provide a secure, strong, and reliable platform to content owners, broadcasters, and post-production operators so that they can keep up high-quality videos with confidence during the digital age. Original Source of the original story >> What are the Key Security Measures you require in a Cloud-Based Video QC System?
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Kosmos 482's Final Descent Captured in One Haunting Image
More than 50 years ago in the early 1960s, the Soviet space program embarked on a bold new undertaking to go where no human had gone before. The Venera mission to explore Earth's nearest orbital neighbor, Venus, is to date the only mission to have successfully landed spacecraft on the deeply inhospitable planet. But, of the 29 probes dispatched on the Venera mission, only 16 landed on or orbited the nearby world. Most of the remainder got temporarily stuck in Earth orbit, falling back to the surface in the same year they were launched. One probe, renamed Kosmos 482, took a little more time to return. Launched in March 1972, it spent just over 53 years stuck looping through space before finally plunging through our atmosphere on 10 May 2025 in an uncontrolled reentry that captured the global imagination. Now, images captured by a German radar station present what is likely to be the last time we'll ever see the failed probe. The data, captured by Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR on 8 May 2025, shows the tumbling roll of Kosmos 482 as it falls through space. As for where it ended up, that is currently unknown and is likely to remain unknown, unless more data becomes available. "The Soviet-era object was last spotted over Germany at 08:04 CEST on 10 May by our colleagues at Fraunhofer FHR as it passed through the sky over their antenna. Because the descent craft was not spotted one orbit later, at the expected 09:32 CEST pass, the reentry can be assumed to have occurred between these two times," the European Space Agency explained on its tracking blog for the object. "A precise time and location of its reentry have so far not been identified. We have not received any reports on direct visual observations of the final reentry or of any impacts on ground." Currently, based on extremely detailed modeling, the best estimate for where it fell is somewhere in the Indian Ocean. This is probably for the best. The conditions on Venus are perhaps most aptly described as hellacious. Surface temperatures average around 464 degrees Celsius (867 Fahrenheit), and atmospheric pressure is about 92 times higher than the atmospheric pressure at sea level here on Earth. Oh, and it rains sulfuric acid (which evaporates before it hits the ground, but any descending spacecraft still needs to get through the atmosphere). All this to say that the Venera probes were built to be extremely sturdy, and scientists thought it likely that Kosmos 482 would at least partially survive the searing heat of reentry to hit the ground intact or in chunks. No one wants a Venus lander raining on their heads. There is, unfortunately, still a lot of defunct junk circling our planet. Once the scope of the problem started to emerge, space agencies began to push a spacecraft design philosophy called Design for Demise. It is what it sounds like: objects sent into Earth orbit should be designed in such a way that they will harmlessly burn up on reentry. However, not all manufacturers have adopted this approach, and we're still sending spacecraft into Earth orbit faster than they can come down. In addition, even spacecraft that are designed to burn up can release ozone-depleting chemicals into Earth's atmosphere. Humanity has been treating low-Earth orbital space with reckless abandon. We were relatively lucky that the descent of Kosmos 482 caused no known problems, but it's a sobering reminder that even space, for us, is not limitless. Sun Unleashes Most Powerful Flare We've Seen in 2025 Venus May Be More Earth-Like Than We Thought – And It's Still Moving The Martian Night Sky Was Seen Turning Green in a Stunning First
India Today
11-05-2025
- Science
- India Today
Soviet-era Cosmos-482 crashes over Indian Ocean after half a century in space
A Soviet spacecraft launched more than half a century ago has finally returned to Earth, ending a decades-long odyssey with a dramatic but harmless plunge into the Indian probe, known as Kosmos 482 or Cosmos 482, re-entered Earth's atmosphere in the early hours of Saturday, coming down about 560 kilometers west of India's Middle Andaman Island, according to Russia's space agency in March 1972, Kosmos 482 was originally intended to land on Venus as part of the Soviet Union's ambitious Venera program. However, a malfunction during launch left the nearly 500-kilogram spacecraft stranded in an elliptical Earth orbit, where it remained for 53 years, slowly losing altitude due to atmospheric drag. The probe's return to Earth had been closely monitored by multiple space agencies, including the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Union's Space Surveillance and Tracking ESA confirmed the reentry after the spacecraft failed to appear over a German radar station, signaling that it had already descended into the 482 was designed to survive the extreme conditions of Venus, featuring a robust titanium shell. This led scientists to predict that parts of the spacecraft might survive reentry and reach the ocean's surface nearly no damage or injuries have been reported, and there are no confirmed sightings of debris on emphasise that the risk to people on the ground from such uncontrolled reentries remains extremely low. The Aerospace Corporation estimated the odds of a person being harmed by Kosmos 482 at less than one in a million, well within international safety international space law, any remains of the spacecraft would legally remain the property of uneventful conclusion of Kosmos 482's journey highlights both the enduring legacy of early space exploration and the growing importance of monitoring aging space debris as human activity in orbit increases.
The Age
11-05-2025
- Science
- The Age
Soviet spacecraft plunges to Earth after 50 years stuck in space
A Cold War-era spacecraft has come crashing down to Earth after being stuck in orbit for more than five decades. An unconfirmed report from Russian space agency Roscosmos claimed that the Kosmos 482 splashed down in the Indian Ocean, west of Jakarta. A Venera module similar to the Kosmos-482 that has crashed back to Earth. Credit: NASA Experts from around the globe had been monitoring Kosmos 482, but its eccentric orbit, coupled with space weather, made its potential landing site difficult to predict. In an update on its Telegram channel, Roscosmos said: 'The descent of the spacecraft was monitored by the automated warning system for hazardous situations in near-Earth space.
