Europe is all set to send a probe to Venus, the first mission to our nearest planetary neighbour in a decade. Venus Express will launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 0333 GMT on Wednesday. The robotic craft will orbit the planet for about 500 Earth days to study its atmosphere, which has experienced runaway greenhouse warming. Scientists hope the mission will shed further light on the mechanisms of climate change on our own world. Venus is almost identical in size to Earth, and is thought to have a similar composition. But there the resemblance ends. A dense, largely carbon dioxide, atmosphere acts as a blanket, trapping incoming solar radiation to heat the planet's surface to an average temperature of 467C (872F). Surface pressure is about 90 times that on Earth. Several Soviet probes sent to land on Venus in the '60s were crushed before they could touch down.

"Venus is, I feel, Earth's little sister. But she went very badly wrong," David Southwood, director of science for the European Space Agency (Esa), told the BBC News website. Speaking from launch pad six at Baikonur, where the spacecraft will blast off on Wednesday, Dr Southwood added: "Back at the beginning of the Solar System, Venus and Earth were really very similar and you wouldn't have known which one to bet on being habitable. "It's as important to look at the failures of the Solar System as its successes."

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