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Venus is the planet closest to the Sun. It is called after Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty and love. After the Moon, Venus is the brightest natural object in Earth’s night sky, and it may cast shadows and be visible to the naked eye in broad daylight on rare occasions. Because Venus orbits Earth, it never appears to go far from the Sun, setting in the west just after nightfall or rising in the east shortly before dawn. Every 224.7 Earth days, Venus circles the Sun. It has a sidereal rotation period of 243 Earth days and a synodic day length of 117 Earth days.

As a result, it takes longer than any other planet in the Solar System to spin around its axis, and it rotates in the opposite direction of all save Uranus. The Sun rises in the west and sets in the east, therefore it rises in the west and sets in the east. Venus is the only planet in the Solar System without any moons, a characteristic it shares solely with Mercury.

Because of their comparable size, mass, closeness to the Sun, and bulk composition, Venus is frequently referred to as Earth’s “sister planet.” In other ways, it is vastly different from Earth. It possesses the densest atmosphere of the four terrestrial planets, with a carbon dioxide content of about 96 percent. The air pressure at the planet’s surface is about 92 times that of Earth’s sea level pressure, or nearly that of 900 meters (3,000 feet) underwater.

Venus has the warmest surface of any planet in the Solar System, with a mean temperature of 737 K (464 °C; 867 °F), notwithstanding Mercury’s proximity to the Sun. Venus is obscured by an impenetrable layer of highly reflecting sulfuric acid clouds that prevents visible light from reaching its surface. It may have formerly had water seas, but they evaporated when the temperature soared due to the runaway greenhouse effect. Because there is no planetary magnetic field, the water has presumably photodissociated, and the free hydrogen has been blown into interplanetary space by the solar wind.

For as long as records have been, Venus has been a prominent fixture in human civilization as one of the brightest things in the sky. Many cultures have deemed it holy to their gods, and it has served as a source of inspiration for authors and poets as the “morning star” and “evening star.” As early as the second millennium BC, Venus was the first planet to chart its movements across the sky.

Venus is a good target for early interplanetary exploration due to its close closeness to Earth. It was the first planet visited by a spaceship beyond Earth (Mariner 2 in 1962) and the first to be safely landed on (by Venera 7 in 1970). Because of Venus’s heavy clouds, visual observations of its surface are impossible, and comprehensive maps of the planet’s surface did not emerge until the arrival of the Magellan spacecraft in 1991. Plans for rovers or more complicated missions have been considered, however Venus’s hostile surface conditions hamper them. The potential of life on Venus has long been a source of curiosity, and it has recently gotten a lot of attention.

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