This an image of the Venus Express (VEX) from the European Space Agency which continually orbited that planet, the second from the sun, and monitored its atmosphere between 2006 and 2014.
It was, you should know, Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus in the early part of the seventeenth-century that proved the truthfulness of the heliocrentric model of the solar system or, as they thought at that time, the universe.
As a graduate student I once spent an exceedingly warm summer at the Johnson Space Center, outside of Houston, doing research for NASA's Oral History Project.
Houston, Texas, is not so wonderful in July, but the Johnson Space Center is an amazing place.
I very much wish that Washington, D.C. valued it more.
