The Venus Transit 2004 ... Extended InfoSheet D7 The clouds of
Venus - a description of the planet's atmosphere One of the
reasons why Venus looks like a jewel in the sky is that this
sister planet of the Earth is covered by a dense cloudy
atmosphere which causes its high visual albedo of 0.65. But this
cloudy shell also completely frustrates any attempt to view the
planet's surface features through optical telescopes. In the
early years of telescopic observation, scientists believed that
the clouds were made of water like clouds in the Earth's
atmosphere and so they came to the conclusion that the
conditions on Venus' surface were similar to the conditions
which prevailed on Earth 250-65 million years ago in the
Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous geological periods. With the
help of spectroscopy we have known since 1932 that Venus'
atmosphere contains carbon dioxide, but until fairly recently we
did not know how much. This situation changed in 1962 when
interplanetary probes undertook missions to the second p