Re: What material would you use for a space suit for landing on planet Venus?

That is an interesting question. Venus has fascinated astronomers as far back as 1600 B.C. Appearing in both the morning and the evening sky, it is appears to be very earth-like planet. It is almost as big as the Earth (95% of the diameter and 81.5% of the mass) but that, I am afraid, is where the comparison stops.

Venus is covered in a dense atmosphere composed of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen, with sulphuric acid, phosphoric acid, and chlorine clouds. Not a particularly hospitable place! On top of that, the surface atmospheric pressure is 90 times that on Earth. That is about 1260 pounds per square inch - an awful lot of pressure. It is equivalent to be about 1 kilometre below the ocean. All of this makes for a greenhouse gone made with an average surface temperature of 737 K. That is about 464 Celsius or 866 Fahrenheit. That is hotter than the melting point of lead (327.5 C) so you could have rivers of molten metal on Venus! (But nobody has seen any yet.)

So, those are the criteria that the suit would have to handle---immense pressure, immense temperature, and an atmosphere made up of corrosive gases and acids. Hmmm.... a pretty tall task.

The material that you would have to use would be something like platinum. It is virtually immune to the effects of the acids and other gases in the atmosphere. It is also one of the stronger and more dense metals which would allow it to fall to the bottom of the atmosphere. (With the really thick gas found in Venus' atmosphere, so of the space probes that we have sent have just floated around in the upper atmosphere!)

The space suit wouldn't look like the sort that you might see in a movie but rather like a deep sea suit or a submersible. If you truly wanted it to be a space suit with arms and legs and such, it would have to be fashioned after one of the deep sea suits that are used by divers to go to wrecks. But it would have to be designed to go to much higher pressures. This would mean that it would need to be beefed up---legs thicker, chest thicker, articulated arms, and a thick sapphire viewing window for the face plate.

There is one other little problem: the heat! In order to keep the occupant cool, it would have to have air conditioning. Okay, maybe that is an understatement. It would have be an incredible efficient refrigerator! The only problem is that air conditioners and refrigerators don't "make cold." Rather, they simply pump heat from inside to the outside. (That is why the back of fridge is always warm.) On Venus, it would be difficult to pump the heat into the already super hot atmosphere. But if you weren't planning on staying long, you could take along a supply of coolant, such as liquid nitrogen. However, that approach would severely limit the time that you could spend on the planet.

All in all, it would have to be a real tough suit---able to withstand acids and gases, extreme pressures, and extreme heat. It would look more like a deep sea diver suit than any thing else. And yes, platinum would be the metal of choice to make it.

Hope this answers your question.