Venus

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the planet Venus which is both the morning star and the evening star, rotates backwards at walking speed and has a day which is longer than its year. It has long been called Earth’s twin, yet the differences are more striking than the similarities. Once imagined covered with steaming jungles and oceans, we now know the surface of Venus is 450 degrees celsius, and the pressure there is 90 times greater than on Earth, enough to crush an astronaut. The more we learn of it, though, the more we learn of our own planet, such as whether Earth could become more like Venus in some ways, over time.

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Guests

• Carolin Crawford 20 episodes
  Public Astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy and Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
• Colin Wilson No other episodes
  Senior Research Fellow in Planetary Science at the University of Oxford
• Andrew Coates 3 episodes
  Professor of Physics at Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London

Reading list

• The New Solar System
  J. K. Beatty, C. C. Petersen and A. Chaikin (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Google Books →
• Venus II: Geology, Geophysics, Atmosphere, and Solar Wind Environment
  Steven W. Bougher, Donald M. Hunten, Roger J. Phillips (eds.) (University of Arizona Press, 1997) Google Books →
• The Scientific Exploration of Venus
  Fredric W. Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0001rm1

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001rm1

Auto-category: 523.4 (Venus)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, the planet Venus is both the morning star and the evening star.