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The orbits of Venus and Earth are the closest between any two Solar System planets, approaching each other in synodic periods of 1.6 years. Venus and Earth have the lowest difference in gravitational potential of any pair of Solar System planets.
The surface of Venus is comparatively flat. When 93% of the topography was mapped by Pioneer Venus Orbiter, scientists found that the total distance from the lowest point to the highest point on the entire surface was about 13 kilometres (8.1 mi), about the same as the vertical distance between the Earth's ocean floor and the higher summits of the Himalayas.
While Venus approaches Earth the closest, Mercury approaches Earth more often the closest of all planets. [11] That said, Venus and Earth still have the lowest gravitational potential difference between them than to any other planet, needing the lowest delta-v to transfer between them, than to any other planet from them. [12] [13]
Venus is similar in size and distance from the sun when compared with Earth, and some researchers believe the planet might have even had an Earth-like climate at some point.
In 1677, Edmond Halley observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun, leading him to realize that observations of the solar parallax of a planet (more ideally using the transit of Venus) could be used to trigonometrically determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. [287] Halley's friend Isaac Newton, in his magisterial Principia ...
The planet is about the size of Venus, so slightly smaller than Earth, and may be temperate enough to support life, the researchers said. Dubbed Gliese 12 b, the planet takes 12.8 days to orbit a ...
Overall, Venus has several times as many volcanoes as Earth, and it possesses some 167 giant volcanoes that are over 100 kilometres (62 mi) across. The only volcanic complex of this size on Earth is the Big Island of Hawaii. However, this is not because Venus is more volcanically active than Earth, but because its crust is older.
The atmospheres of Mars and Venus are both dominated by carbon dioxide, but differ drastically in density: the average surface pressure of Mars's atmosphere is less than 1% that of Earth's (too low to allow liquid water to exist), [123] while the average surface pressure of Venus's atmosphere is about 92 times that of Earth's. [124] It is ...