Planet Venus — Reading Comprehension Lesson

Reading Passage

Planet Venus

Venus is the second planet from the sun and Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor. It is the most similar planet to Earth in terms of size and mass — often called Earth’s twin — but the two planets could not be more different in their environments. Venus has a surface temperature of about 900°F (465°C), hot enough to melt lead. Remarkably, Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is much closer to the sun. The reason is Venus’s thick atmosphere, which traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect. Venus is also the brightest object in Earth’s night sky after the moon, which is why it is sometimes called the morning star or evening star.

Venus has the densest atmosphere of any rocky planet in the solar system. Its atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide, with clouds of sulfuric acid droplets that completely hide its surface from view. The atmospheric pressure at Venus’s surface is about 90 times that at Earth’s surface — equivalent to the pressure about 3,000 feet underwater on Earth. This crushing pressure destroyed the Soviet Venera landers within minutes to hours of landing on Venus in the 1970s and 1980s, even though they were specifically designed to survive. The carbon dioxide atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect so extreme that virtually no heat escapes to space.

Venus rotates very slowly and in the opposite direction from most planets — a retrograde rotation. A day on Venus (the time it takes to rotate once) is longer than a Venusian year (the time it takes to orbit the sun). If you could stand on Venus’s surface and see through the clouds, the sun would appear to rise in the west and set in the east. Scientists are not entirely certain why Venus rotates this way; the leading theories involve a large collision early in the solar system’s history or interactions with its dense atmosphere over billions of years.

Despite its harsh conditions, Venus has been visited by more spacecraft than any planet other than Mars. The surface, mapped by radar from the Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s, reveals a world dominated by volcanic plains, thousands of volcanoes, highland regions, and vast lava flows. There is evidence of geologically recent volcanic activity, and some scientists believe Venus may still be volcanically active today. Its surface is relatively young geologically — about 300 to 500 million years old — suggesting the planet periodically resurfaces itself through massive volcanic episodes. Understanding Venus’s runaway greenhouse effect is increasingly relevant as scientists study climate change on Earth.

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