The colonization of Venus has been a subject of many works of science fiction since before the dawn of spaceflight, and is still discussed from both a fictional and a scientific standpoint. However, with the discovery of Venus's extremely hostile surface environment, attention has largely shifted towards the colonization of the Moon and Mars instead, with proposals for Venus focused on habitats floating in the upper-middle atmosphere and on terraforming.
Artist's rendering of a crewed floating outpost on Venus of NASA's High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC)
The surface of Venus is completely covered by clouds which prevent most heat from escaping.
Artist's conception of a terraformed Venus. The cloud formations are depicted assuming the planet's rotation hasn't been sped up.
The atmosphere of Venus is the very dense layer of gasses surrounding the planet Venus. Venus's atmosphere is composed of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen, with other chemical compounds present only in trace amounts. It is much denser and hotter than that of Earth; the temperature at the surface is 740 K, and the pressure is 93 bar (1,350 psi), roughly the pressure found 900 m (3,000 ft) under water on Earth. The atmosphere of Venus supports decks of opaque clouds of sulfuric acid that cover the entire planet, making optical Earth-based and orbital observation of the surface impossible. Information about surface topography has been obtained exclusively by radar imaging.
Composite image of the polar vortex of Venus in strong red (red image is an infrared view of hot high clouds and the grey image is an ultra-violet view of lower clouds)
Meridional (north-south) component of the atmospheric circulation in the atmosphere of Venus. Note that the meridional circulation is much lower than the zonal circulation, which transports heat between the day and night sides of the planet
False colour near-infrared (2.3 μm) image of the deep atmosphere of Venus obtained by Galileo, red areas are signatures of the hot surface radiating through the atmosphere relatively unhindered. The dark spots are clouds silhouetted against the very hot lower atmosphere emitting thermal infrared radiation.