Film Night November 2025

The atmosphere of the Earth transforms our planet into our world. The great cycles of the gases of the air and water allow us to understand that home.

To understand the planets, we need to understand their atmospheres. We start with the venture of the late Col. Joe Kittinger, who travelled to space without needing a rocket, under an ultra-high atmosphere balloon.

Mikhail Lomonosov discovered the atmosphere of Venus during a rare transit. Soviet exploration of Venus needed to pressure-cook the Venera planetary probes, making them tougher than battle-tanks, so as to survive landing, and take the first photos on its overpowering atmospheric conditions, and the unending lighting of the ‘Veneran Electric Dragon’

Dave Grinspoon (who writes for Sky & Telescope every once in a while, and got asteroid 22410 named after him recently) introduces us to the nature of the atmospheres of other planets, moving through Venus,

to Mars. Andy Ingersoll discusses the Ecosphere of a star, and then turns to the Gas Giants. Dr. Alvin Seiff has in turn designed Galileo’s atmospheric probe of Jupiter’s clouds.

Saturn is next, with the coming exploration by Cassini, and the moon Titan, the only moon in our Solar System with its own thick atmosphere.

 

Since 1999, there have been many developments in understanding the atmospheres of the planets and moons of our Solar Systems, and the exoplanets beyond:

• Huygens has landed on Titan, and the atmospheric conditions are now well described.
• We know a lot more about the great cycles of Venus’ atmosphere
• We have been able to confirm the comet-like tails of planets like Venus, where the atmosphere is being stripped away by solar winds.
• With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, it is now possible to sample those ‘tails’ by IR Spectroscopy, and measure their content.
• In some cases, we can even detect if those atmospheres contain bio-markers for those present in the Ecosphere of their parent stars.