Venus

Venus (or Sol II) is the second planet in the Sol system orbiting the Sun every 224.7 Earth days at a distance of 0.72 AUs. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love.

Being a planet of extreme environmental conditions, the Venusian surface temperature reaches 735 Kelvin at a mean atmospheric pressure of 95 bars.

Hugh Campbell wrote a story called "Venusian Chronicles" for the January 1953 issue of Incredible Tales magazine. (DS9: "Far Beyond the Stars")

Venus was seen on a map depicting the Sol system watched by Nomad. (TOS: "The Changeling")

In 2364, when the USS Enterprise-D crew was infected with polywater intoxication, an officer serving in the shuttlebay delivered an inappropriate limerick over the comm to other crewmembers. (There was a young woman from Venus whose body was shaped like a...) Hearing this, Lieutenant Commander Data began to repeat the limerick, but was cut off by Captain Picard before completing it. (TNG: "The Naked Now")

In the 24th century, Venus had a number of terraforming stations on its surface. (DS9: "Past Tense, Part I")

In an alternate timeline, Miles O'Brien, while still in the 24th century, noted that the terraforming stations on Venus were gone, following the creation of an alternate timeline created when Benjamin Sisko, Jadzia Dax and Julian Bashir disrupted history after transporting to the 21st century.

During his early career, Chakotay spent a couple of months on Venus to learn how to pilot a starship in atmospheric storms. (VOY: "Future's End, Part II")

Venus is the second-closest planet to the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love. It is the brightest natural object in the night sky, except for the Moon, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6. Because Venus is an inferior planet from Earth, it never appears to venture far from the Sun: its elongation reaches a maximum of 47.8°. Venus reaches its maximum brightness shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset, for which reason it is often called the Morning Star or the Evening Star.

Classified as a terrestrial planet, it is sometimes called Earth's "sister planet," because the two are similar in size, gravity, and bulk composition. Venus is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid, preventing its surface from being seen from space in visible light; this was a subject of great speculation until some of its secrets were revealed by planetary science in the twentieth century. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all the terrestrial planets, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide, as it has no carbon cycle to lock carbon back into rocks and surface features, nor organic life to absorb it in biomass. It has become so hot that the earth-like oceans that the young Venus is believed to have possessed have totally evaporated, leaving a dusty dry desertscape with many slab-like rocks. The best hypothesis is that the evaporated water vapor has dissociated, and with the lack of a planetary magnetic field, the hydrogen has been swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind. The atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface is 92 times that of the Earth.

Venus's surface has been mapped in detail only in the last 22 years, by Project Magellan. It shows evidence of extensive volcanism, and the sulfur in the atmosphere is taken by some experts to show that there has been some recent volcanism, but it is an enigma as to why no evidence of lava flow accompanies any of the visible caldera. There is a surprisingly low number of impact craters, demonstrating that the surface is relatively young, approximately half a billion years old. There is no evidence for plate tectonics, possibly because its crust is too strong to subduct without water to make it less viscous, and some suggest that instead Venus loses its internal heat in periodic massive resurfacing events.

The adjective Venusian is commonly used for items related to Venus, though the Latin adjective is the rarely used Venerean; the archaic Cytherean is still occasionally encountered. Venus is the only planet in the Solar System named after a female figure, although two dwarf planets — Ceres and Eris — also have feminine names.