Grant Hutchison's Parasol for Venus in Celestia

• parasol.ssc

  Anyone fancy terraforming Venus?

  Here's a sun-synchronous Venus parasol, which blocks just enough of the solar disc to drop the level of illumination to Earth normal. These things are so big they're affected by radiation pressure, so can't sit precisely at the stable L1 libration point between the Sun and Venus - it needs to be a little sunwards of that point. How far sunwards depends on the density per unit of area of the material the parasol is constructed from - the lighter it is, the further sunwards it sits at equilibrium. But the further sunwards it goes, the bigger it has to be to provide the same amount of shielding. So I've chosen the minimum-mass configuration.

  This is still close enough to Venus to give a slight awkwardness from the variation in line of sight across the Venusian disc - at Venusian sunrise, you'll see the parasol dangling slightly off one side of the solar disc; by midday it's centred on the disc; and by sunset it's dangling off the other edge. This will allow just a tad more insolation at sunrise and sunset, but the mass penalty of moving the parasol farther from Venus to prevent this effect is huge.
  
  Grant Hutchison
  3 Feb 2006

Venus Parasol

Cel:// URLs for the viewpoints shown above shaded side sunlit side from the surface of Venus

• Grant Hutchison's Contributions for Celestia

• Selden's List of Celestia Resources

---

The content of these Web pages was provided by Grant Hutchison.

This Web page is maintained by Selden Ball at Wilson Lab.
Please send any comments or corrections to seb@lepp.cornell.edu