How Venus Saved Earth’s Ozone Layer

June 13, 2025June 12, 2025 ~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

Fun fact about me: Venus is my favorite planet. I just feel like, out of all the planets in the Solar System, Venus has the most personality. Granted, it’s the personality of a mad scientist, or maybe a serial killer. But still… so much personality! Anyway, today I want to share one of my favorite stories about my favorite planet. It’s the story of how Venus (the mad scientist/serial killer planet) accidentally saved all life on Earth.

In 1962, NASA’s Mariner 2 space probe became the first spacecraft to send data back from Venus (the Soviet Union’s Venera 1 probe visited Venus a year before, but due to communications issues, it couldn’t transmit any data back to Earth). In the decade that followed, more missions to Venus sent back even more data, and we learned that Venus spends all her time brewing this super deadly mix of chemicals in her atmosphere. As I said, Venus has the personality of a mad scientist/serial killer. If future astronauts ever try to land on the surface of Venus, she will straight up murder them.

As scientists in the 1960’s and 70’s catalogued all the absolutely terrifying stuff in Venus’s atmosphere, they realized something was missing: ozone. I won’t go into all the chemistry details here, but given the kinds of chemical reactions happening on Venus, Venus should have produced something similar to Earth’s ozone layer. And yet little to no ozone was detected. So what gives?

Well, among all the other horrifying chemicals in Venus’s atmosphere, there are some chlorine-based molecules. Turns out those chlorine-based molecules were interfering with ozone production. Mystery solved! But then somebody said, “Wait, what about chlorofluorocarbons? Those are chlorine-based molecules, and we’ve been releasing them into Earth’s atmosphere for decades.” More research followed, comparing and contrasting Earth and Venus. It turned out that, yes, chlorofluorocarbons (better known as C.F.C.s) were interfering with Earth’s ozone layer just as similar chlorine-based molecules interfered with ozone production on Venus.

By the mid-1970’s, scientists were calling for action. By the end of the 1980’s, politicians were listening, and they actually did something about the problem. The Montreal Protocol is an international agreement restricting the production and use of C.F.C.s and other ozone-depleting chemicals. As a direct result, today Earth’s ozone layer is healing, and there’s hope that the ozone layer will fully recover by the end of the 21st Century. Would scientists have figured out what C.F.C.s were doing to Earth’s ozone layer without Venus’s help? Probably. But they might have figured it out too late.

A couple months ago, I did a post about solar storms and the danger they pose to our modern technological world. In that post, I cited solar storms as one of the reasons why space exploration is worthwhile, despite the notoriously high price tag. This story about Venus and the ozone layer? This is another example of why space exploration is worth the money. Comparing and contrasting Earth with another planet helped save us from disaster once before. Who knows what other valuable lessons Venus (or Mars, or any of the other planets) still have to teach us?

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Click here for a video from Sci-Show entitled “How Studying Venus Saved Earth.”

Or click here for an article from The Conversation entitled “What Venus has taught us about protecting the ozone layer.”

If you’re wondering why the ozone layer’s so important, click here for an article from How Stuff Works entitled “What If the Ozone Layer Disappeared?”

And lastly, some of you may be thinking, “Hey, didn’t they discover an ozone layer on Venus just a few years ago?” You’re right, they did! It’s at a much higher altitude than Earth’s ozone layer, and it’s much thinner and more tenuous, too. But Venus does have just a little bit of ozone after all. Click here to learn more.

The art used in today’s post is my own original work. If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble. Shopping on RedBubble is a great way to support artists (like me) so that we can keep doing what we do. Thank you!

Living with a Star

April 11, 2025April 10, 2025 ~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

I love space, you love space—lots and lots of people love space. It’s easy to get large numbers of people hyped up about outer space! But as soon as you start talking about funding space exploration, the mood shifts. Folks get uncomfortable, and it turns out that space can be a controversial topic after all. So today, I want to talk about one of the reasons (just one of the reasons) why space exploration is worth the high price tag. It has to do with the Sun.

Earth has a complicated relationship with the Sun. Sure, the Sun gives Earth something to orbit. It also provides Earth with light and heat and generally makes this planet livable. However, the Sun also throws spectacular temper tantrums, flinging all sorts of high energy radiation and electrically charged particles out into space. Sometimes, when the Sun throws a temper tantrum, it flings all those charged particles and all that super scary radiation directly at Earth.

Fortunately, Earth’s magnetic field protects us, deflecting the danger away or redirecting it toward Earth’s poles (this is what causes auroras). And so, for the vast majority of human history, the Sun could throw all the temper tantrums she liked, and we haven’t had to worry about it much down here on the ground. That changed on September 1st, 1859.

On that day, English astronomer Richard Carrington was studying sunspots on the Sun (using the proper safety filters on his telescope, I presume) when he observed an absolutely stupendous flash of light. Most likely, Carrington witnessed what we now call a coronal mass ejection, or C.M.E. Seventeen hours later, that C.M.E. hit Earth. It’s said that the resulting auroras stretched from the poles to the tropics and were bright enough to turn night into day. I’ve read some versions of this story that claim auroras were even visible at Earth’s equator.

The Carrington Event, as we now call it, in Richard Carrington’s honor, must have been a beautiful sight. However, this was also the first time a C.M.E. of that magnitude hit Earth while Earth was wired up with telegraph lines. As Earth’s magnetic field reacted to the impact of the C.M.E., induced electric currents wreaked havoc up and down the world’s telegraph network. Telegraph operators received electric shocks. Telegraph equipment started shooting sparks. In some instances, those sparks started fires.

The world today is even more wired up with technology than it was in 1859, so how bad would it be if something like the Carrington Event happened again? No one really knows, but the Sun doesn’t need to produce another Carrington Event to mess with our technology. Much weaker solar events have damaged or disabled our satellites in orbit, triggered power outages here on the ground, and caused radio communications blackouts. Solar storms pose radiation hazards for astronauts, obviously, but they can also put the passengers and crew of aircraft at risk, especially if those aircraft are flying anywhere near Earth’s north or south poles. Solar storms are enough of a problem that insurance companies are paying attention, and they get nervous whenever the Sun stars acting up (see the “want to learn more?” section below if you want to learn more).

So in the early 2000’s, NASA created the Living With a Star program, or L.W.S. Because, for better or worse, the Sun is right there, and we have to live with it. As of this writing, there are three active L.W.S. missions in space, plus a few other solar science missions that operate outside the L.W.S. program. They’re all monitoring the Sun, gathering new data about solar physics, doing their best to give us a least a little warning whenever the Sun decides to hurl a giant, radioactive fireball our way. In time, perhaps these missions will teach us why the Sun’s temper tantrums happen in the first place, so that we can better predict when they’ll happen next.

I heard something on a podcast recently: there is a difference between knowing the cost of a thing and understanding the value of that thing. Space exploration costs an enormous amount of money. There’s no denying that. But for a society like ours, on an increasingly technological world like ours, the value of something like the International Living With a Star program far exceeds the cost. This is just one example of why space exploration is worthwhile, despite the high price tag, and in upcoming posts I’m planning to offer other examples, too.

Thank you for reading, friends. I hope to talk to you again soon.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Click here to read “The Carrington Event: History’s greatest solar storm” from Space.com

Click here to visit NASA’s website for the Living With a Star Program.

I mentioned that solar storms can make insurance companies nervous. Click here for an article on how much money the insurance industry could potentially lose due to an “extreme space weather event.”

And lastly, here’s a link to the podcast I mentioned near the end of my post. The podcast is called Stories from Space, and the episode is titled “WTF is Happening at NASA?”

Mr. Pailly Goes to Washington

May 10, 2024May 9, 2024 ~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

Sometimes I say I’m shy. Sometimes I call myself an introvert. But that’s not the full truth. I have some deep-rooted social anxiety issues which date back to some unpleasant experiences I had around the age of ten. And yet, despite that deep-rooted social anxiety, I recently took a big risk. A week an a half ago, I participated in an event in Washington, D.C., where ordinary citizens (not professional lobbyists) talk to Congress about why we love space and why we support NASA funding.

This event was organized by the Planetary Society, a non-profit group that was established in 1980. Carl Sagan was among the original founders, and Bill Nye is the group’s current C.E.O. Americans like to gripe about our government, but NASA stands out as one of the few government agencies that’s actually popular with the American people. And yet Congress seems to believe, at times, that voters don’t really care about space exploration. This makes NASA more vulnerable to budget cuts than most other federal agencies. The Planetary Society exists to help show Congress that voters do care, that voters do support NASA, and that voters want to see NASA properly funded.

Now I fully understand that space exploration is expensive, and I fully understand that we have a lot of problems here on Earth. But year after year, I keep hearing about budget cuts at NASA. I keep hearing about important missions falling behind schedule or being canceled outright. And earlier this year, I heard about mass layoffs at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, along with more layoffs at various companies that serve as NASA contractors. I believe space exploration is our pathway to the future, and so when I keep hearing about all these cutbacks at NASA, I worry that we’re so focused on the problems of today that we’re letting our future slowly slip from our grasp (in case you’re wondering what I said to Congress, that’s almost word-for-word what I said to Congress).

As I said at the top of this post, I went to D.C. despite having some deep-rooted social anxiety issues. That’s how much I care about this issue. But there’s more to it than that. I didn’t just do this despite my social anxiety; I also did it because of my social anxiety. I wanted to push myself. I wanted to test myself. I’m tired of this problem holding me back in life, and I want to overcome it. I knew this trip wouldn’t be easy for me, and in some respects it ended up being even harder than I expected. But I got through it, and hopefully what I said to Congress will make a difference.

The Planetary Society does this “Day of Action,” as they call it, every year, and I plan to go again next year. The way I see it, if I can learn to be a better advocate for space exploration, then I can also learn to be a better advocate for myself. Time will tell how much my trip to D.C. has helped me, but I can already say that it has helped me at least a little.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s some information from Pew Research about the popularity of various U.S. federal agencies, with NASA ranked the third most popular agency after the National Parks Service and the Post Office (two other agencies that Congress seems to keep trying to cut).

And here’s an article from SpaceNews.com about the recent layoffs at NASA JPL.

And lastly, you don’t have to personally go to Congress to advocate for space exploration. You can also call your congressional representatives on the phone. Here’s an article from the Planetary Society explaining how to do that and how to do it effectively.