Venus Probe Deployed by the European Space Agency

This should bring back some interesting new information from the planet Venus. Check out some of the factoids about our so-called sister planet. If the sensors on this probe picks up screams of souls in Hell then all bets are off.

1 VENUS lies some 108,200,000km, or 67,232,000 miles, from the sun and is just over 12,100km (7,520 miles) in diameter.

2 Venus spins extremely slowly compared to the Earth, and in the opposite direction. One full revolution of the planet takes 243 Earth days. A year on Venus - the length of time the planet takes to travel round the sun - is shorter than the length of its day, at 225 Earth days.

3 The average surface temperature on Venus is more than 30 times warmer than Earth at 465C. This is at least partly because of the massive amount of carbon dioxide present in the planet's atmosphere. The so-called greenhouse gas makes up around 96 per cent of Venusian "air", with nitrogen accounting for just 3 per cent. The atmospheric pressure of Venus is 9,300 kilopascals at ground level, which is about 93 times the atmospheric pressure found at sea level on Earth, and equivalent to the pressure at a depth of 1,000 metres in Earth's oceans.

4 Scientists believe that the Venusian "mists" may be made of metals such as iron pyrites (or fool's gold) and tellurium, which have been vaporised because of the extreme heat and pressure on the planet. These compounds can also fall as snow on upland areas.

5 Winds on the cloud tops run at more than 215mph.

6 It is thought that Venus once had large amounts of water, much like Earth, but that it boiled away, leaving the planet extremely dry.

7 The centre of the planet is thought to be similar to Earth's: an iron core with a molten-rock mantle.

8 The landscape of Venus is mostly a "gently rolling plain", with little in the way of mountain ranges. However, there are two large upland areas, one about the size of Australia in the northern hemisphere, called Ishtar Terra, and another called Aphrodite Terra, which is about the size of South America, on the equator.

9 Venus's tallest mountain is called Maxwell Montes, after the Scots physicist James Clerk Maxwell, and it is 12,000 metres (39,370ft) above the planet's average surface, despite being only 10km (six miles) wide at the base. On Earth, the base would be too narrow to support such a large structure.